History of England 1-6

The Church was by far the greatest landowner in the country, and therefore the largest employer. Many saintly and devout clerics could still be found, but the majority of the clergy had gone the way of the world. The bishops and abbots, for the most part, lived in great state and luxury. The lowlier monks also lived in conditions of comfort, with the obligations of prayer and study offset by the more familiar pursuits of hunting or hawking. They gambled and they drank; they often pursued women where they did not lust after boys.

The secular clergy, better known as the parish priests, were often unlearned. They may have had to till the land and gather the harvest together with their parishioners. They were of the earth. Many no doubt offered spiritual consolation, and administered the sacraments with due care, but others set no such good example. They lived openly with their mistresses, and neglected their duties. They were in the marketplace and the alehouse more often than they were in the church. The people of Saltash in Cornwall, for example, complained about their priest to the dean of Windsor. ‘He is deaf,’ they wrote, ‘and cannot hear confessions except to the scandal of those confessing; he is a discloser of confessions, because he gets drunk and reveals the confessions of parishioners … he sells the sacramentals to his parishioners, and refused to minister the last rites to those labouring in the final stages when he was asked.’

In times of famine and plague, of course, the piety of the people in such matters as individual prayer and mortification was all the more plaintive and fervent. At a slightly later date, manuals of devotion became more popular among the literate. This did not amount to a rejection of the authority of the Church. The institution was taken for granted, but fresh avenues of access to the divine were required by the pious. Some, however, questioned the wealth of the Church; some knights and London merchants, in particular, were opposed to clerical pretensions in every sphere of social and economic life. In the parliament of 1371 they argued that the lands of the clergy should be taken over for the sake of the public purse.

The life and career of John Wycliffe must be placed in this context. He was himself in holy orders, a Fellow of Merton College in Oxford before becoming Master of Balliol College at the same university. He was a doctor of divinity, and in that profession he had acquired a great reputation both as a teacher and a writer. He became known as ‘the flower of Oxford’, and was held by many contemporaries to be ‘the greatest clerk that they knew then living’. He held two ‘benefices’, two rural parishes that he did not visit but from which he collected the revenue. He had also come to the attention of the king’s court, and was granted a retainer for his services to the Crown.

He was useful to certain members of that court, among them John of Gaunt, because of his avowed disdain for clerical wealth and privilege. He represented a genuine distaste, shared by some of the nobility and many of the gentry, for the temporal possessions of the Church. But he was a scholar who pressed ahead his arguments with a blithe disregard for the consequences in the world around him; he followed the light, or will-o’-the-wisp, of reason wherever it led him. He wrote in university Latin, and in books whose titles may be translated as On the Eucharist and On the Power of the Pope he denounced the claims and corruptions of the Church. No printing presses were of course then available to disseminate his message, so it was laboriously copied by hand.

In these manuscripts he espoused the power of scripture, and suggested that the holy word of God was more important than the sacramental hierarchy of the Church. He believed in a version of predestinarianism, by which the elect were already known to God. There was no need for an elaborate machinery of Church power, which simply interfered between the individual soul and its maker. He taught that the king, rather than the pope or the bishops, was the fountain of grace in the land. He denounced the pope as the Antichrist. Friars and monks were repellent and superfluous. Wycliffe also condemned the worship of the saints as idolatry.

More significantly, perhaps, he denied the doctrine of transubstantiation by means of which the substance of the bread and wine of the Mass was changed by miracle to the body and blood of Christ. His animus against the clergy was one of the commonplaces of the period, but his argument against the eucharist laid him open to the charge of heresy. It was said that he was a ‘wicked worm’ sowing the seeds of schism.

It is not clear that one word of the supposed ‘Wycliffite Bible’, the first English translation of the entire body of Scriptures, was actually composed by Wycliffe himself; it seems to have been the work of his followers at Oxford, but they were undoubtedly moved by the same spirit of change. Wycliffe wanted the word of God to be made known directly to the people without priestly mediation. In particular he wished to deliver the Bible to the labourers in the field. The ploughman should be able to hear the word of God. The ploughman should also be able to interpret it in his own way and for his own purposes. This was where the Church drew the line. St Peter himself had stated that ‘no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation’ (2 Peter 1:20).

Wycliffe was never charged or tried, and was allowed to retire to the parsonage of Lutterworth where he continued his studies in peace. But he was effectively silenced. In the following century, on the orders of the pope, his bones were dug up and burned. But in the 1370s no formal apparatus existed for the suppression of heresy. It was so little known, in fact, that no defence against it was considered necessary. Heretics were believed to be strange enthusiasts from overseas, like the Cathars of Languedoc or the Waldensians of Lyon and elsewhere. They were not, and never could be, English.

Yet this university doctrine, promulgated by Wycliffe, was soon taken up by popular preachers and sectarians who rejoiced in his attack upon the pope and his stripping the altars of sacredness. His doctrines were discussed in small assemblies or ‘night schools’. These enthusiasts came to be known as Lollards, derived from the Low Dutch lollen or lallen meaning ‘to sing’. An informal network of Oxford scholars, grouped around Wycliffe, may have taught their lessons to receptive audiences. The connections can no longer be followed. ‘They have nothing more’, wrote one hostile contemporary, ‘than a certain appearance of humility of posture, in lowering of the head, abandonment of clothing and pretence of fasting; they pretend simplicity in words, affirming themselves to be burning with love of God and neighbour.’

Burning or not, there did emerge a broad Lollard movement that espoused Wycliffe’s arguments as well as adding some of its own. The sacraments were dead signs. There was no purgatory, other than life on this earth, so Masses for the dead have no value. Bread could not be made holier by being muttered over by priests. Confession could only be effective if the priest was full of grace, but no such priest has ever been found. Prayers cannot help the dead any more than a man’s breath can cause a great ship to sail. Pilgrimages served no heavenly or earthly purpose. What is a bishop without wealth? Episcopus Nullatensis: Bishop of Nowhere. St Thomas of Canterbury had already been consigned to hell for endowing the church with material possessions. The pope is an old whore, sitting on many waters, with a cup of poison in his hands. Greater benefit could be derived from a cask of ale than from the four Evangelists. More eccentric propositions were sometimes entertained. One Lollard, William of Wakeham, believed that the land was above the sky.

The Lollards seem to have flourished in the towns, and along the trading routes between towns. It was the faith of the merchant and the artisan rather than the farmer or the agricultural worker. It was strong, therefore, in London and Bristol, Coventry and Leicester. We are talking of hundreds, rather than thousands, of adherents. Yet it was persistent, and provoked royal vengeance in a later reign.

William Smith of Leicester was a ‘deformed’ man who became one of the new sectarians and set up a school in the chapel of St John the Baptist next to the leper-house in Leicester. He gave up the eating of flesh or fish; he avoided wine and beer; he walked about barefoot. He also taught himself to read and to write. One evening he and some of his disciples, sitting in a local inn close to the chapel, grew hungry. They had a supply of vegetables, taken from the fields, but they had no fuel with which to cook them. Then William Smith remembered a wooden image of St Katherine that lay in a corner of the chapel. ‘Look, my friends,’ he said, ‘God has provided us fuel; this image will be holy fuel. By hatchet and fire she will suffer a new martyrdom and perhaps, by cruel pains, arrive some time in the kingdom of heaven.’ He took up the hatchet. ‘Let us see if she be a true saint,’ he added, ‘for, if so, she will bleed; if not she will be good for fire to cook with.’ This reflects the true spirit of Lollardism, rejecting the images of saints as nothing but senseless idols. The incident was inconceivably shocking to the ordinary people, however, and Smith’s words were reported to the authorities of the town. He was ordered to walk, barefoot and bare-headed, in a procession from the church of St Mary’s in Leicester; he was to hold an image of St Katherine in his right hand, and kneel at the beginning, middle and end of the procession. The ceremony was to be repeated during the Saturday market of the town.

Yet not all of the new faith were poor or disadvantaged. Sir Laurence of St Martin, Justice of the Peace, sheriff and MP for Wiltshire, attended Easter Mass in the spring of 1381 and received communion; he did not swallow the host, however, but spat it into his hand. He took it home and divided it into three parts; he ate the first part with some oysters, the second part with onions, and swallowed the remaining piece with his wine. His sin was observed and denounced. He was ordered to do public penance on every Friday for the rest of his life; he was to kneel before a stone cross that was carved with the images of his sin. He was also dismissed as sheriff. There had of course always been a strain of unbelief and as early as 1200 the prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, suggested that ‘there are many people who do not believe that God exists, nor do they believe that a human soul lives on after the death of the body. They consider that the universe has always been as it is now, and is ruled by chance rather than by providence.’

Others did not travel so far in heresy. Certain knights and grandees favoured only elements of the new teaching. Some of them attended the preachings of the Lollards, armed with sword and buckler to protect the preacher from the insults of bystanders. These men were not necessarily heretics in any real sense; they were more interested in Wycliffe’s attack upon the clergy and the general wealth of the Church. Some were genuinely devout, however, and took part in that broad movement of lay piety known as devotio moderna which emphasized the inner life of the spirit and the individual’s humble love of God.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century the convocation, or general assembly, of the Church asked the parliament to announce some action against the Lollards. They were still a small sect, but they appeared to be growing. They were finding an audience among the disaffected, and the spiritual authorities were worried about any possible consequences. So in 1401 an Act was passed against ‘a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the sacraments and usurping the office of preaching’. They were spreading sedition and insurrection. The bishops were granted the power to arrest and imprison any offenders. If they did not renounce their pernicious beliefs, they could in the end be burned ‘in an high place’ before the populace. This is the first time that the stake was appointed as the ultimate penalty for heresy. In the next century the fire would become one of the notable judicial sights of England.

The first to die was a London chaplain, William Sawtré, who had declared that the bread of the Mass remained merely bread. On 26 February 1401, he was stuffed inside a wooden barrel at Smithfield and placed upon the flames.

In what sense did Wycliffe and the Lollards presage the general religious reformation of the sixteenth century? An affinity in certain doctrines, later promulgated both by the Lutherans and the Calvinists, no doubt exists. The detestation of the pope and the spiritual hierarchy, the denial of transubstantiation, the rejection of any worship of images and the increasing reliance on a vernacular Bible, are all part of the same general repudiation of the Catholic Church. Yet in the fourteenth century these attitudes were held only by a small minority. They did not spread very far, and were detested by a large proportion of the population. ‘I smell a Loller in the wind’, is the line given to one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales. It needed another set of accidental circumstances, and another cast of characters, before the Christian faith of England could be reformulated.

In the fourteenth century, however, the religion of the vast majority of the English people remained utterly orthodox and familiar. There was no appetite for change, and no sense of an ending. The Church was part of the texture of life, as enveloping and as inescapable as the weather. England was in any case an island of saints, with the cult of English sainthood being encouraged from the twelfth century; seventeen Englishmen and Englishwomen of that century were beatified.

This was the land of the ecclesiastical style known as the Perpendicular, a peculiarly English form of architecture that flourished in the reign of Edward III. Just as Chaucer abandoned French for English, so the great masons of the latter half of the fourteenth century renounced the Rayonnant and Flamboyant styles of France. The greatest of all these English masons, Henry Yevele, died in the same year as Chaucer himself; his early patron, John of Gaunt, was also the poet’s patron. So there is a correspondence. Yevele worked at Windsor, Westminster, Canterbury, Durham and St Paul’s as well as superintending the building of many castles, chapels and collegiate churches throughout the country.

Perpendicular was a wholly and uniquely national style, first adumbrated in Gloucester Cathedral. The king introduced it in his rebuilding works at Windsor. It became the pattern for a myriad of parish churches, and is the dominant style for the rest of the medieval period in England. Perpendicular is plain and ordered, with soaring shafts of stone; on slender piers and high arcades there rests a vast and stately vault. The emphasis is always upon the vertical line. The effect is simultaneously one of simplicity and magnificence. It is an austere style, perhaps hastened by the more sombre mood of the country in the years succeeding the Black Death. Carving of too elaborate a nature was no longer fashionable; as the nave of Canterbury Cathedral will testify, the emphasis rested upon total effect rather than on curious detail. There was an instinct for unity.

The 9,000 parish churches of England were the centres of all communal activity, where the living were organized and the dead were commemorated. This was the place where the parishioners were baptized, married and buried. Royal proclamations were issued from the church; local elections were held, and local accounts audited, in the nave. The prized possessions of the community were held there in chests, under lock and key. Disputes were settled and negotiations undertaken, within the walls painted with images of the saints and the apostles. The sculpted forms of angels and saints looked down on the throng from the hammerbeam roof. Assignations, and trysts, were kept by the church porch. Each church had its own brewhouse, to make ‘church ale’. Many of the parishioners joined religious guilds, by means of which an altar or a side chapel was maintained with voluntary contributions. On the days of procession the members of the parish would walk in harmony around the church, sometimes showered with flowers and unconsecrated hosts known as singing cakes. The churchyard was used for Sunday markets, and for games such as wrestling and football. But it was also a sacred and even fearful place. The key to the church door was prized as a sovereign remedy against mad dogs, and the ringing of church bells exorcized demons riding in thunder and lightning. Church liturgy itself was deemed to be a form of magical incantation, and sometimes the eucharist was preserved by those who had taken communion; the holy bread could be used to cure ailments or to ward off witches.

The Mass was part of village life; as it was performed before the altar in the chancel, behind the rood screen, the people would gossip and yawn and whisper. The chancel was maintained by the priest, while the nave was the responsibility of the parishioners. The rood screen itself, between the nave and the chancel, was a highly decorated wooden panel on which were painted or sculpted images of the Crucifixion or of the Day of Doom. The service was accompanied by a continual murmur of voices, except at the holy time of the consecration of the eucharist, and by occasional laughter. There was little, if any, preaching and very few pulpits.

Dogs and chickens wandered among the people, who stood or kneeled on the rushes or straw strewn over the earth floor. Sometimes the churchgoers just walked around, staring at the statues of the Virgin or the saints. Some attempt was made at seating in the thirteenth century, but pews did not become a familiar aspect of the church interior until the fifteenth century. Disputes over status were frequent. Who should first go forward for communion? Some of the congregation played chess, or even gambled with dice. Women brought in their needlework. Arguments might erupt, and fights might break out, in the course of the Mass. A bargain might be sealed with a handshake. Thus proceeded the vigorous and ebullient religious life of the fourteenth century, in which earth and heaven were inseparable.

25

The commotion

Richard of Bordeaux was ten years old at the time of his coronation as Richard II. He was the son of the Black Prince and thus closest in blood to the dead king. In the summer of 1377 he was led to Westminster Abbey under a canopy of blue silk borne on spears of silver, and he lay prostrate before the altar as the choir sang the litany. By the end of the long ceremony the boy was exhausted, and was taken to a private apartment in Westminster where he might rest. On the following morning the prelates and the magnates met in a great assembly to choose twenty-four of their number to form a minority council. It might have been thought that the young king’s eldest surviving uncle, John of Gaunt, would have taken precedence; but, having ensured that some of his supporters were part of the council, he withdrew with his followers to Kenilworth Castle. He may have been awaiting events.

The boy king assumed the crown at a time of murmuring and dissatisfaction. The shortage of labour, as a result of the pestilence, meant that the great landlords were trying to exact as much work as they could from their unfree tenants; the legislation prohibiting any rise in wages, although only intermittently effective, was still the cause of much complaint. General discontent had also been aroused at the heavy burden of taxation; war supplies were always needed as a result of unsettled business with the French. Only a few days before the coronation, the forces of King Charles V had plundered Rye and burnt down Hastings.

Yet the king’s first real test came four years later, when he was confronted by the greatest rebellion in English history. At a meeting of parliament in Northampton, in November and December of 1380, ‘a great and notorious rumour’ spread among the Commons about a ‘dreadful thing’ that had taken place in York; a group of rebels, armed with swords and axes, had broken their way into the guildhall of that city and driven out the mayor. They were protesting about the level of taxes imposed upon them by the royal court.

Nevertheless, the Northampton parliament decreed a poll tax three times more exacting than the last. It was the third such tax in four years. A poll tax, literally a tax on every ‘poll’ or head, was a wholly inequitable mode of taxation; rich and poor paid the same alike, with the proviso that the richer people had the means and opportunity of evasion. So the greater burden fell upon the poor. Widespread unrest followed, naturally enough, and judicial officials were sent to the more disobliging areas in order to ensure collection. The commissioners in London declined to carry on their unwelcome work, for the good reason that it had become too dangerous.

The men of Essex were the first who refused to pay; on 30 May 1381, at Brentwood, a royal official was attacked and driven off. The revolt quickly spread to Kent, Suffolk, Norfolk and Hertfordshire, encompassing some 340 villages. It is pertinent that these were the counties most affected by the pestilence; they were the areas most likely to feel the effects of economic instability and insecurity in the wake of the vast mortality. Change, in medieval society, was always unsettling. In Essex and Kent, also, the labour laws were most strictly imposed. Here, if anywhere, are the causes of rebellion.

The Kentish rioters occupied Canterbury and released all the prisoners held in the archbishop’s prison, among them a cleric known as John Ball. The rebels went on to burn the rolls of the county on which the estimates for taxation were written. On the following day the crowd broke open Maidstone Prison and freed its inmates. They already had a clarion call. ‘John Ball greets you all and gives you to understand, that he has rung your bell.’

The movement grew much more dangerous when, on 11 June, the rebels of the various regions agreed to march or ride upon London. That was the centre of their woes, the home of the lawyers and the royal officials. It has been estimated that some 30,000 men were now on the road. The men of Kent, always the most fierce, went northwards, while the men of Essex came from the east and the rebels of Hertfordshire from the north. The Hertfordshire men made a camp at Highbury, while the men of Essex rested and waited at Mile End. It was at this point that they were informed of risings all over England. Riots erupted in Norwich and in St Albans, in Winchester and in York, in Ipswich and in Scarborough.

The Kentish men, under the leadership of Wat Tyler or Wat the tiler, gathered on Blackheath on 12 June. The king had retreated to the Tower of London for safety, but on 13 June he and his most trusted councillors agreed to meet the main body of protesters on the heath. The royal party sailed in four barges down the Thames in order to land at Rotherhithe, but too many rebels were clustered on the south bank to allow a safe landing. The young king could now quite clearly hear the terrible shrieks and cries that would soon echo through the streets of London. A chronicler reported that the rebels ‘made such a great clamour that it really seemed as if the devil himself had joined their company’. The barge returned to the Tower.

The royal retreat inflamed the rebels. Tyler now led his people to the city itself. They stormed the Marshalsea, in Southwark, and freed its prisoners. Another party burned the tax records held at Lambeth Palace. Then they made their way across London Bridge. The people of London refused to allow the city gates to be closed against them; they sympathized with the cause. They, too, were oppressed by royal exactions on behalf of an unpopular war. The crowd surged along Fleet Street, opening the Fleet Prison and pillaging the lawyers’ quarter of New Temple. The Londoners, now invigorated by their example, burned down the residence of John of Gaunt, the Savoy Palace, and killed many of his officials. As the leading nobleman of England, during the minority of the king, Gaunt was the most hated.

The young king surveyed the scene of looting and burning from a window of the Tower, and asked what should be done. No one knew. But at fourteen he was old enough to think for himself; he would ride out to Mile End and address all of the rebels. He hoped that this would draw them from the city into the eastern suburb, and thus allow his court and household to escape from the Tower. In this, he was only partially successful.

On Friday, 14 June, he made the short journey to Mile End on his horse. He was accompanied by the mayor of London, William Walworth, and some of the household knights. He was already showing signs of personal courage worthy of a king. When the royal party approached the rebels knelt upon the ground, and some of their number shouted, ‘Welcome, King Richard. We wish for no other king but you.’ Richard then asked them what else they wanted. They wanted ‘the traitors’, by which they meant the officials who had taxed them and harassed them beyond measure. They wanted to remove a government of scoundrels. The king replied that he would surrender to them any men who were convicted of treachery according to the law. It was a convenient answer to turn away wrath. One of their other demands was that all serfs should be given their freedom, and that land should be rented at fourpence per acre (0.4 hectares). Richard agreed to these proposals. Certain ‘traitors’, however, were already being summarily despatched. A group of rebels had entered the Tower, in the king’s absence, and had dragged out the archbishop of Canterbury and other officials who were sheltering there. All of them were beheaded on Tower Hill, the site of public execution.

More blood was to be shed in this fortnight’s storm. The people of London and the suburbs were confronted by groups of rebels and asked ‘With whom holdest thou?’ If they did not reply, ‘With King Richard and the commons’, they were beaten up or even beheaded. The rebels declared that they would have no king with the name of John, a clear reference to John of Gaunt. All over England the manors of lords were now being pillaged, and their inhabitants killed. Lawyers and justices were seized, and tax records burned. The proceedings of one manorial court are typical; the heading of one page reads curia prima post rumorem et combustionem rotulorum: ‘this is the first court after the revolt and the burning of the rolls’.

War and plague had done their work. At approximately the same moment of the fourteenth century, popular rebellions emerged in neighbouring nations. In Flanders the commons had rebelled against their count, Louis, and swept him out of the country; the Jacquerie, in France, unleashed a wave of riot and bloodshed in Paris, Rouen and the surrounding countryside. In Florence a popular revolt of the wool carders and other workers, the ciompi, destroyed the political structure of the city.

The morning after the young king’s ride to Mile End, on 15 June, Richard came to parley with the rebels at Smithfield. Wat Tyler waited for him there at the head of 20,000 insurgents. As soon as Tyler saw Richard, he rode up to him and began to converse with him. There is a hint that at this point he seemed to be threatening the king, or at least treating him disrespectfully. He began to play with his dagger, and then laid his hand on the bridle of the king’s horse. At this point, fearing treason, the mayor of London stabbed a short sword into Tyler’s throat. Tyler rode a little way, fearfully wounded, and was taken to the hospital of St Bartholomew beside Smithfield.

The rebels were shocked and angered at the event; some of them drew their bows. The young king galloped up to the front line of archers. ‘What are you doing?’ he called out to them. ‘Tyler was a traitor. Come with me, and I will be your leader.’ He did literally lead them a little way north into Islington, where 1,000 armed men had been summoned by the mayor. It seems likely that the rebels had walked into a hastily improvised trap. The leaders fell to their knees, and begged for pardon. Some of the court wished to punish them on the spot, but the king wisely desisted. He ordered the rebels to return to their homes, and forbade any stranger from spending the night in the city. Soon afterwards Tyler was taken from the hospital of St Bartholomew and beheaded in Smithfield itself.

A few days later Richard revoked the charter of emancipation he had granted to the crowd at Mile End, on the ground that it had been extorted from him by violence. He travelled to Essex in order to observe the aftermath of the now extinguished revolt. A group of villagers there asked him to remain faithful to the pledges he had made to them a few days before. His retort, as described by one contemporary chronicler, is worth recording for the insight it shows into the temperament of the king. ‘You wretches’, he said, ‘are detestable both on land and on sea. You seek equality with the lords, but you are unworthy to live. Give this message to your fellows: rustics you are, and rustics you will always be. You will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example to posterity.’ A parliament was called later in the year, where it was proposed that the state of bondage known as villeinage should be abolished. The Lords and the Commons, their vital interests as landlords at stake, unanimously voted against any such action. This marked the essential conclusion of the rebellion.

In some areas, such as the recalcitrant county of Essex, the punishments were harsh. The leaders of the rebels were beheaded. John Ball was arrested in St Albans, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered. Wat Tyler had gone before him. After their deaths, they were enshrined as heroes in folk memory. Yet in other regions the reaction of the authorities was more moderate than might have been expected. It is clear that they did not wish to inflame a still dangerous situation.

The unsuccessful rebellion has been called in retrospect ‘the peasants’ revolt’, suggesting that the rebels came from the lowest agricultural class. But the court records show that the participants were generally the leaders of village life, and acted as bailiffs, constables and jurors in their neighbourhoods. It can be argued that these men, far from being accidental or opportunistic rebels, were in fact enunciating real and important grievances. They were of course protesting against the judicial commissions set up to claim the poll tax, but they were also objecting to the corruption of justice by the local magnates. The ordinances and statutes concerning labour, after the Black Death, had materially changed the role of law. It was no longer an instrument of communal justice; it had instead become the machinery of exaction designed to control and discipline the lower classes. The rebels were also protesting against an increasingly futile war, for which they had to pay. They were denouncing greedy landlords. They were violently opposed to a noble class that had shown little interest in the condition of the countryside.

And, as their claims and demands came together, a more general sense of protest was being enunciated against the conditions of life in the fourteenth century. ‘Ah, good people,’ John Ball declared in a sermon to the rebels on Blackheath, ‘matters will not go well in England until everything is held in common and there are neither villeins nor gentlemen. These gentlemen dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and labour, the rain and wind in the fields. Let us go to the king. He is young. Let us show him in what servitude we live.’

Other wandering preachers dwelled on the age-long theme of equality and justice, going from parish to parish and calling to the villagers just as they were leaving church; their theme was that all things under heaven should be held ‘in common’. The day of 13 June – the day when the king’s barge turned back to the Tower in the face of the rebels – was Corpus Christi, the feast of the body of Christ in which the whole community was deemed to be a token of that holy body. It was a day of village celebrations and processions, in which the eucharist was carried in triumph around the streets and lanes of each community. So the rebels had, in a sense, pronounced themselves to be holy by marching or riding in a host. They were pronouncing the sacredness of fellowship. The holy bread is made up of many grains. Christ is the miller.

It was claimed at the time that Ball was a follower of Wycliffe, and that Lollardy itself was one of the causes of sedition. Since the Lollards were in no sense a popular movement, the connection is in many respects implausible. But ideas of change and renovation were in the air. Wycliffe had taught that the right of property was founded in grace and that no sinful man was entitled to the services of others; the theories of the scholar could easily be translated into the slogans of the people. So Ball, in his sermon at Blackheath, taught that all men were created equal, and that the ranks and stations of the social hierarchy were the inventions of their oppressors. God wished them to recover their original liberty.

Songs and sayings flew out of the rebellion like sparks from a fire. ‘Jack Trueman would have you know that falseness and guile have reigned too long. Truth has been put under a lock. Falseness reigns in every flock … Sin spreads like the wild flood, true love, that was good, is fled, and the clergy work us woe for gain … Whoever does wrong, in whatever place it fall, does a wrong to us all … With right and with might, with skill and with will; let might help right, and skill go before will, and right before might, so goes our mill aright … The commons is the fairest flower that ever God set on an earthly crown.’

The consequence of the revolt was unease and even dread. A chronicler, recording troubles eleven years after the events here related, remarked that ‘men all over England were sure that another general insurrection was at hand’. For more than two centuries the fear most expressed by the authorities was that of local rebellion. A revolt of the masses could trigger disaster for the state. Sporadic revolts after 1381 did indeed take place, often in the form of ‘rent strikes’ against oppressive landlords. In the face of unbearable tensions, however, attempts were made to appease and accommodate the demands of the peasants. No further poll tax was ever exacted, not at least in the medieval period. The slow abolition of serfdom, and the rising prosperity of those in work, created a sense of freedom that had found one manifestation in the revolt. It also encouraged a greater relaxation of the old feudal order.

The living standards of the agricultural workers improved perceptibly over a generation. Real wages grew, despite the attempts at legislation prohibiting any such rise, and a poem such as ‘How the Ploughman learned the Paternoster’ reveals the profusion of meat, fish and dairy products in the households of the labourers:

November: At Martinmas I kill my swine

December: And at Christmas I drink red wine.

Life expectancy also rose. The historians of dress have noted that clothing became brighter, and more luxurious, and jewellery more evident, in the latter years of the fourteenth century.

The king himself had passed a test of fire. He had confronted, and defeated, the first and last popular rebellion in English history. His later behaviour suggests that his belief in himself, and in the essential divinity of kingship, was thereby redoubled. At the age of fifteen he was truly a king whose presence alone was enough to command large crowds of people into obeying his will. He was 6 feet (1.8 metres) in height, with blond hair and a round, somewhat feminine face; he had flared nostrils, prominent cheekbones and heavy eyelids. John Gower, at the beginning of the king’s reign, described him as ‘the most beautiful of kings’ and the ‘flower of boys’. He may have been indulging in a little flattery, but the chroniclers of the period were at one in emphasizing Richard’s beauty. He looked the part.

His manner, however, was considered to be abrupt. He was inclined to stammer, when he was excited, and he flushed easily. His temper was somewhat uncertain, and he was always quick to assert his royal dignity. His words to the rebels of Essex, whether he actually uttered them or not, are in that sense characteristic. Other accounts of his speech and behaviour tend to corroborate them. ‘I am a king,’ he said to one earl, ‘and your lord. I will continue to be king. I will be a greater lord than ever I was before, in spite of all my enemies.’ His anger was terrible, just like that of his Plantagenet ancestors. He once drew his sword on the archbishop of Canterbury, and would have killed him had he not been restrained. One chronicler, known only as ‘the monk of Evesham’, described him as being extravagant in dress and imperious in temper; he was frightened of war and preferred to spend the night ‘carousing with friends’ and indulging himself in ‘unmentionable’ ways. This has often been taken as an allusion to Richard’s possible homosexuality, but to a monk many things may be unmentionable.

The emphasis on his royalty meant that he cared deeply for ceremony and for spectacle. He enjoyed dressing up. On one occasion he wore a costume of white satin on which were hung cockle-shells and mussel-shells plated in silver; his doublet was adorned with orange trees embroidered in gold thread. He loved to preside at tournaments, but he was not so enthusiastic about true battles. One of his relatives, Thomas of Lancaster, declared at a later date that ‘he is too heavy in the arse, he only asks for drinking and eating, sleeping, dancing and leaping about’. The medieval texts often refer to ‘leaping about’ without explaining what is meant by it. Thomas of Lancaster went on to say, according to the chronicler Froissart, that ‘this is no life for men-at-arms who ought to win honour through deeds of arms and put their bodies to work’.

In 1383 the young king declared that he was now prepared to rule in person, having taken the precaution of marrying Anne, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, at the beginning of the previous year. Both parties were fifteen years old, and Anne was described by a chronicler as ‘a tiny scrap of humanity’. Now bolstered by formidable marital relatives, and by his own assumption of power, Richard felt able to choose his advisers beyond the charmed circle of the hereditary lords. This was not to the taste of his uncles, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock – dukes of Lancaster and Gloucester respectively – who withdrew from the court in protest against what they called ‘evil advisers’. Richard feared Gaunt and Woodstock, as possible claimants for the throne, and he filled his household with favourites. The new king was lavish in the grants of lands, castles and titles; he borrowed heavily, and was obliged to give the crown of England as security. The old lords, out of favour and denied gifts, were growing restless. It is the familiar story of jealousy and suspicion, compounded by the king’s own secretive and sensitive temperament. The court had become a dangerous place once more.

In the spring of 1383 there had been a botched campaign to relieve Flanders of French control; it had been led by Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, but the bishop did not prove to be a good commander. In full martial gear he led his troops into battle against the Flemish towns, but his victims were ordinary Flemish citizens. ‘Men, women and children’, according to one report, ‘were hewed together in one vast massacre.’ The bishop may have believed that he was saving their souls. His army was eventually surrounded, and terms were agreed without Despenser ever having attacked the French enemy. It seems likely that the king himself planned an invasion of France in this year, but the prospect of heavy taxation and another popular insurrection deterred him.

Another military failure followed two years later. France and Scotland, old friends in arms, were eager to pursue a joint campaign from the north of England. So in the summer of 1385 Richard II gathered an army to forestall them. He called a feudal summons, the last such summons in English history, and the larger magnates were obliged to respond to the call. The English army met at Newcastle and marched northwards, burning Melrose Abbey and other religious houses on their way to Edinburgh. Once the king arrived in the capital, however, he realized that the Scots had gone; the Scottish soldiers were moving towards the Highlands. Some of his commanders urged him to pursue them, but he declined to do so. Why march into barren countryside without the chance of finding supplies? So he went home. This was an eminently wise decision. Doing nothing is sometimes the best course. But it did not improve the king’s reputation for valour. He had been given the opportunity of displaying himself as a sovereign of war, the indisputable qualification for a king, but success eluded him.

The debacle only served to increase the young king’s antipathy to war. In the course of his reign he would never again lead his armies against the French or the Scots. There would be no memorable battles, no sieges, no towns or castles conquered. In any case the English treasury could no longer afford the cost of further military adventure.

Further rumours of war were being whispered in the spring and summer of 1386. A French army of 30,000 men was being gathered on the coast of Flanders, and was compared to the Greek army that had overcome ancient Troy. The people of Rye, Sandwich and Dover were commanded to remain within the walls of their towns, and the castles close to the southern coast were strengthened and refurbished. The citizens of London were ordered to stock food supplies that might last for three months. It was reported that some Londoners were leaving the city. Richard himself planned yet another attack upon France, but the Commons refused to supply his coffers. The threat of invasion faded away by the end of the year. The French court, like that of the English, did not have the funds to maintain so large an army for so long. Autumn gave way to winter. The fierce weather of that season was another deterrent. The business of the country could go on unimpeded, in theory, and the English people could enjoy the pleasures of peace.

In October 1386 the parliament met in Westminster Hall, as had become the custom, but Richard had prepared a surprise for its members. The statues of previous monarchs, larger than life-size, adorned the hall; the thirteen kings, from Edward the Confessor to Richard himself, looked down upon the proceedings. It was a signal vision of Richard’s concept of kingship. The power of sovereignty was meant to overawe the lowlier subjects of the realm.

It did not work out like that in practice. The Lords sent several petitions to the king, all designed to curb his use or abuse of power. He was accused of flouting the law, and ignoring the advice of his proper councillors. He was condemned for appointing and rewarding unsuitable advisers; he gave out land and offices without advice, and made free use of pardons for rape and murder in order to raise revenue. It was clear, at least, that he was now strong enough to resist the counsels of the senior members of the realm.

A deputation from the parliament visited the king at the palace of Eltham, since Richard himself had refused to travel to Westminster. They demanded the removal of his chancellor, Michael de la Pole, one of the ‘new men’ whom Richard favoured at the expense of the old nobility. The king raged against the assembled Lords and Commons, accusing them of disloyalty and even of treachery. He told them, in his abrupt and angry manner, that he would not dismiss a servant from his kitchen at the behest of parliament. Rumours of plots and counter-plots were everywhere. Richard was behaving in secret and arbitrary ways, and it was whispered that he wished to behead the most notable of his enemies.

It was time for a more powerful intervention. Thomas of Woodstock, the duke of Gloucester, sought a further interview with Richard at Eltham; he was accompanied by Richard FitzAlan, eleventh earl of Arundel, a powerful and skilful nobleman. These two magnates informed the king that he had been ruling England unwisely and unlawfully. They said that the country had always been governed by the concord between the king and the noble lords; only a sliver of truth can be found in this argument, but they enforced their claim with a barely disguised threat that the king could be deposed. The example of his great-grandfather, Edward II, was laid before him. That unfortunate monarch had been forced to resign in favour of his son before being cruelly murdered. Thomas of Woodstock, one of Richard’s uncles, may even have desired the throne for himself.

Richard took the example of Edward II to heart. Nine years later he would plead with the pope to canonize his predecessor as one of the great royal saints of England. There is no doubt that he always felt a strong sense of identification with his unhappy ancestor. But in the winter of 1386 he was obliged to temporize with his enemies. He was still only twenty-one years old, and could not have been entirely sure of himself. He could not yet afford to antagonize them. So he yielded to their demands. The king would come to Westminster. He agreed that his household could be investigated and administered by a commission of nobles and bishops. Michael de la Pole was dismissed, and later imprisoned. Thomas Arundel, bishop of Ely and brother of Richard FitzAlan, took his place as chancellor.

The parliament house had never been so powerful as it was in the last months of 1386, but it would be unwise to praise its members too highly. They were not necessarily good patriots fighting against a tyrant. They were just as preoccupied with their own interests as were the king and his household; a poem of the period describes their conduct as confused and uncertain. Some members sat there ‘like a nought in arithmetic that marks a place but has no value in itself’. Some were taking bribes from royal officials or other interested parties, and some were paid dependants who would not say anything without orders. Some stumbled and mumbled; others slept or stammered their way through their speeches, not knowing what they meant to say.

The king chafed under the restrictions imposed upon him by what soon became known as the ‘Wonderful Parliament’. The commission was given its powers for a year; Richard decided to wait and watch, while at the same time mustering his resources. He consulted with the aldermen of London and the sheriffs of the counties, but received only ambiguous encouragement. His exactions had hardened their hearts. Then he called upon the judges. The most senior of them met in the summer of 1387, and determined that the king could change or dismiss the ordinances of parliament at his will. This effectively annulled the power of both Lords and Commons. The judges also declared that those who had attempted to curb the power of the king could be punished as traitors even if they were not technically guilty of treason.

This was most serious for the king’s opponents. The earls could be beheaded, for example, and their lands held forfeit. Throughout the autumn a tense confrontation was continued, the lords refusing to meet the king after he had summoned them. The earl of Northumberland tried to act as a mediator between the two parties, but it became clear that there was no room for compromise or negotiation. So in November the lords rose up in arms. They called upon their household forces and, at a battle beside the Thames near Radcot on 20 December 1387, they defeated an army sent against them. Then they marched upon London, where Richard was sheltering in the Tower.

It seems likely that the king was deposed for two or three days, effectively stripped of his power, but no clear agreement about the name of his successor could be found. Faced with rival claims, the only real choice was to reinstate the young king suitably chastened and obedient. To be deprived of his throne, even for a few days, was a severe blow to his own regal sense of selfhood. He had in effect been stripped of his identity.

Richard did indeed submit to their demands. The lords took over his household, and dismissed some of the royal servants. Other household officials were arrested. The lords then summoned a parliament to meet on 3 February, where they wished to deal with their other enemies. There is an account of the opening session in which the lords, dressed in gold robes, linked hands and slowly advanced upon the king as he sat upon the throne; then they bowed to him, and filed into their places. It became known as the ‘Merciless Parliament’.

Their first victims were the judges who had pronounced them to be traitors. The Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Robert Tresilian, was tried and condemned to death while his judicial colleagues were sentenced to exile in Ireland. Tresilian fled for sanctuary to a chapel of Westminster Abbey, but he was dragged out and carried off to Tyburn. The mob carved images of the devil, and of the zodiac, upon his body before his throat was cut and his corpse hung upon the gallows. Seven of the king’s followers were also executed.

Yet the new regime of the lords was not marked by any great success. The Commons had hoped that the removing of the ‘evil’ counsellors from the king’s side would benefit the realm by financial and judicial reform. But the Lords were divided; they pursued their own interests to the detriment of the Commons. The finances of the country did not improve, and factional violence became increasingly common. They also failed in the pursuit of military glory; a planned invasion of France degenerated into a series of coastal skirmishes. The kingdom could only properly be guided by a king. A gathering of notables was not sufficient.

So Richard struck back. In the winter of 1388 the king offered to act as a mediator between the Lords and the Commons. The great lords were effectively lawless, and were able to escape justice with impunity. They were, to use Langland’s word, ‘wolveskynnes’. With their bands of followers they were acting like local tyrants oppressing the common people. Richard offered to restrain his own use of retainers, and sweetly asked the lords to follow his example. His was a policy of divide and rule. He represented strength and compromise.

In the spring of 1389 the king declared, to his council at Westminster, that he had decided once more to assume full responsibility for the affairs of the nation. There was little disagreement. He said that for twelve years he and his kingdom had been ruled or overruled by others. What had been the result? The people had been burdened by excessive taxation that had benefited no one. He was now twenty-two, and would rule alone.

Richard’s sense of kingship had been threatened and almost destroyed in the last days of 1388; now he projected it more fiercely and defiantly. His nomenclature changed. The petitions of the Commons were addressed to ‘your highness and royal majesty’ rather than, as before, to ‘your rightful and gracious lord’. The royal servants began to describe him as ‘highness’, ‘majesty’ and ‘your high royal presence’. He told one knight out of Warwickshire, Sir William Bagot, that he wished to be remembered as one who had ‘recovered his dignity, regality and honourable estate’ and who had ensured that his prerogative was ‘humbly obeyed … as it had been in any other king’s time’.

He believed himself to be the source of all justice and order, the pattern of authority; that is why he was gracious to the Commons as well as to the Lords. They were all equally his subjects. It is a measure of his sense of greatness that his household was three times as large as that of Henry I. In the autumn of 1390 he also began to gather around him a body of followers, known as an ‘affinity’, who adopted as a badge the image of the white hart. He derived it from the coat of arms of his mother. All is of a piece with his love of pageantry and his taste for magnificent robes. The court became the stage for his splendour. At some banquets, and at the three festal crown-wearings of the year, he would sit in state upon his throne watching everyone but conversing with nobody; he would remain very still, crowned and in full regalia, as if he had become a living statue. ‘And if his eye fell upon anyone,’ a chronicler reveals, ‘that person had to bend his knee to the king.’

His sense of royalty was also an aspect of his piety. God was his only overlord. He frequently visited the shrines of saints, and instituted new cults; he was fascinated by reports and rumours of miracles; he was the patron of the Carthusians, and lavished treasure for the rebuilding of churches and abbeys. There is a panel painting, known as ‘the Wilton Diptych’. On the left panel Richard is depicted kneeling, dressed in a red mantle embroidered in gold, with Edward the Confessor (saint), John the Baptist (saint) and King Edmund (saint and martyr) standing around him. On the right-hand panel is painted an image of the Virgin and Child surrounded by eleven angels. One of the angels holds aloft the flag of St George. So here Richard celebrates the continuity of his reign with his saintly Anglo-Saxon forebears, united in the veneration of peace and national renewal. He compounded his attachment to the memory of Edward the Confessor by impaling his own arms with the arms of the dead king. It might almost seem that Richard even considered himself to be worthy of canonization.

Yet triumphalism can turn into tyranny. In the summer of 1397 Richard invited the earl of Warwick to dinner and then, when the meal was over, ordered his arrest. On hearing the news of this, the earl of Arundel was persuaded to surrender himself. The king then rode out to Pleshey Castle in Essex, the home of Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, with a party of armed retainers. Woodstock was roused from sleep, and was then personally arrested by his nephew. Richard ordered the immediate arrest of these three great lords on the grounds that they were conspiring against him. He may also have been brooding on old offences, since these were the three men who had led the rebellion against him and had briefly deposed him in the Tower. He now believed himself strong enough to destroy them. He was asserting his manhood by avenging past affronts.

The chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, wrote that the kingdom was ‘suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into confusion’. Richard then called a parliament that, in the general atmosphere of suspicion and terror, was notably submissive. It had every reason to be cooperative. Westminster itself was filled with troops, and the king was protected by a bodyguard of 300 archers from his favourite county of Cheshire. The building in which the parliament assembled was surrounded by archers. Richard was relying upon force, and the threat of force, to make his way.

At the beginning of the session he declared, through the mouth of his chancellor, that the king demanded the full plenitude of his power. He had been aware of many illegalities committed in previous years but now, out of his affection for his people, he extended a general pardon – except to fifty individuals, whom he would not explicitly name. This was of course a policy to keep everyone in subjection. He might include anyone he pleased within the category of the unknown fifty. The king was also gracious enough to accept, at the urging of the Commons, the duties levied on leather and wool in perpetuity.

Thomas of Woodstock, after his arrest, was despatched to the English bastion at Calais where on the king’s direct orders he was quietly killed. Reports suggest that he was either strangled with a towel or suffocated beneath a featherbed. The result was in any case the same.

Arundel was subjected to what would now be called a show trial, of which a partial transcript survives. John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, presided.

Lancaster: Your pardon is revoked, traitor.

Arundel: Truly you lie. Never was I a traitor.

Lancaster: Why in that case did you seek a pardon?

Arundel: To silence the tongues of my enemies, of whom you are one.

Richard: Answer the appeal.

Arundel: I see it all now. You, who accuse me, are all liars. I claim the benefit of pardon, which you granted when you were of full age.

Richard: I granted it provided it were not to my prejudice.

Lancaster: The pardon is worthless.

It was indeed worthless. On the same day Arundel was led to Tower Hill where he was beheaded. The earl of Warwick suffered a more lenient fate. He was banished for life to the Isle of Man. The extensive lands of the three lords were confiscated, and given to the king’s friends and supporters. His enemies appeared to have been scattered.

Yet Richard was despondent. His wife, Anne of Bohemia, had died in 1394 from an outbreak of the plague; they had been married for twelve years, but had produced no children. That was another mark against him. He was, after all, already twenty-seven years old and should have sired a family. In his extravagant grief he ordered that the palace of Sheen should be razed to the ground; this is the place where he and Anne had once been happy. It seems likely that his health was also deteriorating, since the royal accounts show very large sums of money being paid to his physicians. He may have been becoming dangerous.

Many of the lords testified later that they had in fact become frightened of the king. With the invisible list of fifty traitors he could confiscate lands and property as he wished. He could consign anyone to prison. According to a later deposition the king had declared that the law of England resided in his own breast, and that he could make or break laws at his discretion. He levied large fines on the towns and shires that had sided with the rebel lords. He demanded loans from the richer abbeys and monasteries. He was, like most kings, avaricious and acquisitive; but his greed was compounded by violence and disregard of law. ‘He is a child of death,’ he wrote to the count of Holland, ‘who offends the king.’ Yet like all tyrants he was fearful. He was defended at all times by the 300 Cheshire archers. ‘Sleep securely while we wake, Dick,’ the captain of his guard was heard to say to him, ‘and dread naught while we live.’

Richard’s pre-eminent will became manifest in a quarrel between two lords at the end of 1397. Thomas Mowbray, the duke of Norfolk, and the king’s cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, the duke of Hereford, had only recently been ennobled to the highest rank of the peerage. They were rewarded for their support of the king. Mowbray, for example, had been captain of Calais when the unfortunate Thomas of Woodstock was despatched to that garrison town; there is no doubt that he played some role in his suffocation. In the climate of fear and suspicion in which they now lived, however, even the king’s friends began to fear for their lives.

They had a conversation. ‘We are on the point of being undone,’ Mowbray told Bolingbroke. ‘That cannot be,’ Bolingbroke replied. ‘The king has granted us pardon and has declared in parliament that we behaved as good and loyal servants’. Mowbray went on to remark that ‘it is a marvellous and false world that we live in’, suggesting that Bolingbroke and his father, John of Gaunt, narrowly escaped being murdered by the king’s men; he also suggested that Richard, with the connivance of other lords, was planning to disinherit both of them and give their lands to others. ‘God forbid’, Bolingbroke exclaimed. ‘It will be a wonder if the king assents to such designs. He appears to make me good cheer, and has promised to be my good lord. Indeed he has sworn by St Edward [the Confessor] to be a good lord to me and others.’ Mowbray was dismissive. ‘So has he often sworn to me by God’s body; but I do not trust him the more for that.’ In a world of whispers and of clandestine plotting, of lies and of secrecy, this was equivalent to treason.

Rumours spread. Bolingbroke informed his father, John of Gaunt, of the conversation. Word got back to the king. It seems likely that he confronted Bolingbroke, and demanded a full account of what had been said. Having heard his report the king demanded that he repeat it to the parliament. Mowbray then gave himself up into the king’s custody, and denied everything that Bolingbroke had revealed. The two dukes were told to appear before a parliamentary committee set up to resolve the dispute. Still the controversy could not be concluded and, in the old judicial fashion, it was decreed that Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke should fight a duel in which God would confer victory upon the true man. Yet who was the true man? It is possible that their roles should be reversed, and that Bolingbroke had been the one who had first expressed misgivings about the king; when they failed to work upon Mowbray, he decided to accuse him of treason to cover up his own guilt. That is one possibility. It is also possible that Mowbray had whispered treason as a plot to snare Bolingbroke; Bolingbroke, suspecting this, decided to end the conspiracy by denouncing him. The truth cannot now be recovered.

The battle was set for Coventry on 16 September 1398. The tournament was to be held at Gosford, and the field survives still as Gosford Green. Bolingbroke commissioned armour from Milan, and Mowbray from Bohemia. The lords of the kingdom were consumed with excitement; this would be the most famous duel of their lifetimes. The days of Arthur and the Round Table might be said to have returned. The two dukes came forward on the appointed day. The archbishop of Canterbury was among the many thousands of spectators. Henry Bolingbroke arrived at nine in the morning, with six mounted retainers. Challenged about his business he proclaimed in a loud voice, ‘I am Henry, duke of Hereford, come to do my duty against the false traitor Thomas, duke of Norfolk’. He crossed himself and rode to his pavilion at one end of the lists. The king entered, surrounded by the Cheshire archers, and proceeded to his chair of state where he might survey the proceedings. Mowbray then appeared and, giving the same challenge as his antagonist, cried out, ‘God save the right!’

The two knights were about to proceed against one other. Bolingbroke spurred his horse forward, while Mowbray remained still. But the king rose and called out, ‘Hold!’ The dukes retired to their respective pavilions, and the king withdrew. Two hours passed, inciting intense speculation among the crowds of spectators. Then the Speaker of the Commons appeared and announced to the multitude the king’s decision. Bolingbroke was to be banished from the realm for ten years, and Mowbray would be exiled for life. The sentence on Bolingbroke provoked loud calls of dismay, but the king’s will was law.

The king really had little choice in the matter. Victory for either man would cause him considerable difficulty. If Mowbray was triumphant, the king’s role in the murder of Gloucester might be subject to scrutiny. If Bolingbroke were the winner, his chance of succeeding or even supplanting the king might be increased. The king had no heir, and he had only recently married a child of seven – Isabella, the daughter of the king of France – from whom no issue could yet be foreseen. It was a most disappointing end to what might have been a great tale of chivalry. But the king prevailed. The two men sailed into exile. Thomas Mowbray died in Venice in the following year, but for Henry Bolingbroke the story was only beginning.

He had sailed to France with a manifest sense of injustice at the hands of the king, and waited there in the hope that favourable events might follow. The king of France, Charles VI, granted him a residence in the centre of Paris. Then, five months after his departure from England, his father died. John of Gaunt, as the first duke of Lancaster, was the progenitor of what became known as the house of Lancaster; he owned vast territories in the north of England, and possessed more than thirty castles throughout the realm. He had been a prominent, but not a notable, commander and administrator. He had in particular earned the hatred of Londoners, and of those who had taken part in the rebellion of 1381, as de facto leader of the realm during the king’s minority. He was a man who combined familial greatness with personal mediocrity.

Henry Bolingbroke might in the normal course of events be expected to inherit his father’s lands and castles. But he was in exile. And the king was greedy. Richard then took a course that alienated much of the support he had acquired over the years of his rule. He extended Bolingbroke’s banishment in perpetuity, and confiscated his father’s estates. Such an interference in the laws of inheritance was immensely shocking to a society that relied deeply upon custom and precedent. No landowner, or landowner’s family, could feel safe under such a king. Any monarch who unlawfully deprived his subjects of their property, in defiance of the injunctions of the Magna Carta, was at once considered to be a tyrant.

At the beginning of May 1399, in a spectacular act of folly, Richard sailed to Ireland with an expeditionary force. It is difficult to understand why he chose to absent himself from his kingdom at such a difficult time; the only explanation must be that he had lulled himself, or been lulled, into a false sense of security. Certainly he believed that he was under divine guidance, and that no earthly enemy could defeat an anointed king. With God as his guard, what did he have to fear?

Henry took advantage of the king’s absence and, in the early summer, sailed from Boulogne; on 4 July he landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire with no more than 300 soldiers. His courage, and earnestness, cannot be in doubt. From his own old territories in the north, he began his campaign to destroy the tyrant of England. Richard had left the kingdom to the guidance of Edmund, duke of York, his uncle and Henry’s. York was neither principled nor courageous. He had no intelligence of Henry’s movements, and at first marched west rather than north-east. In the confusion Henry strengthened the castles on his lands, and in the process several thousand men flocked to his service. At Doncaster he met the senior family of the north, the Percys; Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, was accompanied by his son known as Hotspur.

In their presence Henry swore an oath that he had returned to England only to claim his lands; he had no designs upon the king himself. He may have been lying, but it is more likely that he was not yet sure of his ultimate goal. He would proceed with caution, taking advantage of events as they unfolded. The combined army of the rebel lords and retainers then began the march south, taking control of central and eastern England with only pockets of resistance. It may now have occurred to Henry that the king was too unpopular to be saved.

Richard himself was still in Ireland. He received news of the invasion by 10 July, but did not set sail for England for another two weeks. He could not muster enough ships. In that period his cause was lost. When the Welsh gentry were summoned to support him, they replied that they believed Richard to be already dead. Henry had decided to move west in order to confront the king, if and when he should return, and at a parish church in Gloucester the duke of York surrendered to the invader. York realized that Richard’s hopes of retaining the crown were diminishing day by day. He joined Henry’s army and went on to Bristol, where three of the king’s most prominent officials were executed. It had become a triumphal progress.

Richard landed on the Welsh coast on 24 July. He lingered here for five days, by which time he had received news of both the surrender of his uncle and the events at Bristol. It is reported that he was alternately despondent and defiant. Eventually he decided to attempt to reach one of his supporters, the earl of Salisbury, who was at Conway Castle in North Wales. He put on the garb of a poor priest and, with fifteen supporters, fled in the dead of night. It took him nine days to reach his destination. A contemporary observer reports that he was now utterly downcast and dejected. He frequently broke into tears.

Henry shadowed him along a parallel course. He, too, went north from Bristol towards Chester. So the two cousins were ready for the final encounter. The king and the earl of Salisbury agreed that they would send representatives to Henry, demanding to know his intentions. In return Henry sent his negotiator, the earl of Northumberland, to converse with the king at Conway. Northumberland, prudently, concealed his army before entering the king’s presence. It is reported that Northumberland swore to the king that Henry wished only for the return of his own lands and would protect the king’s right to rule. It is impossible to judge whether Henry was deceiving the king. After a delay of a few days Richard agreed to leave the castle in the company of Northumberland. Yet his was only a tactical surrender. He told his supporters secretly that Henry ‘would be put to bitter death for this outrage that he has done to us’. That prospect must also have occurred to Henry himself.

Richard and Northumberland had only travelled a few miles when the king, on ascending a hill, saw the army that his companion had previously concealed. He fell into a panic, and demanded to be taken back to Conway Castle. Once more Northumberland swore, on the precious host, that Henry had no thought of deposing him. If this was a bluff, it was a sacrilegious bluff. So the party travelled onwards to Flint Castle in north-eastern Wales where, alerted by swift messengers, Henry had agreed to meet Richard. It must have occurred to the king that he had now effectively been taken prisoner. He reached the castle before Henry and, on the morning after his arrival, he climbed up to the battlements; from that vantage he saw Henry’s army approaching, and is reported to have said that ‘now I can see the end of my days coming’.

He kept Henry waiting, at the great door, while he ate his last meal of freedom in the keep of the castle. Then at Northumberland’s request he came down to speak with his enemy. In the play Richard II by William Shakespeare, he uttered at this point the words, ‘Down, down, I come like glistering Phaeton’. Henry took off his cap and bowed low to the sovereign. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I have come sooner than you sent for me, and I shall tell you why. It is said that you have governed your people too harshly, and they are discontented. If it is pleasing to the Lord, I shall help you to govern them better.’ This report has the ring of truth. Henry would have made sure that his words were exactly recorded. It is significant, too, that he spoke in English rather than in French. Now he represented the nation. ‘If it pleases you, fair cousin,’ Richard replied, ‘then it pleases us well.’

On that same day the two men, and the army, rode on to Chester. The king was consigned to a small room in the castle; he was under the control of the sons of Gloucester and Arundel, two men whom he had put to death. Henry now set his mind to the future. He issued a summons, in the king’s name, for the assembly of a new parliament at Westminster. On 20 August he and his captive rode to London. Henry took up residence in the bishop of London’s palace, while the king was despatched to the Tower.

It may have been only at this point that Henry decided to strike and claim the throne. He had been waiting on events, but now saw his path clear ahead of him. The king was at his mercy, and no body of royal supporters was able to liberate him. There may have been a show of force by the Cheshire archers upon whom the king had relied, but it came to nothing. Henry now decided to consult the histories of the realm for precedents. Two weeks later a committee of dignitaries was established to consider ‘the matter of setting aside King Richard, and of choosing the duke of Lancaster in his stead, and how it should be done’ (Henry had become duke of Lancaster on the death of his father). The committee came to the conclusion that Richard should be deposed ‘by the authority of the clergy and people’.

On 29 September a deputation had gone to the king lodged or imprisoned in the Tower. The official parliamentary report suggests that the members of this deputation ‘reminded’ the king that at Conway he had volunteered to give up his throne; the king, recalling this promise, agreed that he should abdicate. This is most unlikely and, in any case, a contemporary chronicler provides a wholly different picture of the occasion. The author of the Chronique de la Trahison et Mort de Richard II states that the king raged at the nobles who had come to interview him and declared that he would ‘flay some of these men alive’. Another chronicler had visited the king eight days before, and described him as bitterly angry at the country that had betrayed him. It seems fair to say that he did not go quietly into the night.

On 30 September a parliament met at Westminster. There are reports that it was packed with Henry’s supporters, ‘many sorts of folk who were neither noble nor gentle … in such great heaps that the officers could scarcely enter the hall’. The king’s renunciation of the throne was read out to those assembled. Although the official report asserts that he had agreed to its terms, and that he had signed it in the presence of witnesses, there is still a possibility that the document was faked. It was, at the very least, extorted with threats. Richard may have agreed to it as the only way of saving his life.

Yet by acclamation of all those present, it was accepted. They were asked if Henry had the right to be king. ‘Yes!’ they cried out. ‘Yes! Yes!’ Even though parliament had no formal right to deposition, the king was removed in what was essentially a coup d’état. Henry then declared that by virtue of ‘the right line of blood coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’ he had come to ‘recover’ a realm on the point of being undone by bad laws. There is no reason to question his sincerity in this. He had a very good claim to the crown. By the complicated processes of genealogy only a boy of eight, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, had a stronger; but England did not want, or need, another juvenile monarch.

Henry was led towards the throne; he stood for a moment, and then knelt down to pray. Then he rose, made the sign of the cross on the back and the front of the throne, and sat down upon it to general acclamation. He was anointed with the chrism that had come from a miraculous phial given by the Virgin Mary to Thomas Becket; or so it was believed. Richard II had discovered it, two years before, while searching in the Tower for a necklace once worn by King John. It is also reported that, as a result of the anointing, the new king’s hair was soon full of lice.

From his earliest youth Henry had been acquainted with the uses and abuses of power; he was only three months older than Richard, and had carried the sword before him at the coronation in the summer of 1377. Henry had also been with him in the Tower when Richard and his entourage sheltered from the peasants’ rebellion. There had never been peace between the two men, however, and Richard also chose to view Henry as a personal enemy. He gave him none of the great offices of state and had chosen his uncle, Edmund of York, to succeed him in a direct rebuff to Henry. Now the whirligig of the world had turned. Lancaster had triumphed over York, but the forcible removal of the king would bring much mischief and bloodshed to the realm.

On the day after the parliament Richard was informed of his deposition. He replied that he ‘hoped that his cousin would be a good lord to him’. He was soon disabused. The new king asked the lords for their advice on the deposed monarch; he was told that Richard should be placed in a stronghold under the care of trusted gaolers and that no one else be allowed to see him. So Richard was removed, in disguise, to Leeds Castle. From there he was taken, at the beginning of December, to the more heavily fortified castle at Pontefract in Yorkshire.

Some of Richard’s courtiers and supporters rose in rebellion two or three weeks later, but Henry thwarted and defeated them. The rebellion, however, made it clear that the deposed king was still dangerous. At the beginning of February 1400, the king and council met to debate Richard’s future. If he was alive, they concluded, he should be heavily guarded; if he was dead, his body should be shown to the people. Death had entered the room. A week or two later the body of Richard lay in his prison cell. The manner of his going is not known. Some say that he was starved by his gaolers; others believe that, in his grief, he refused all food and so killed himself.

His body was taken south, in procession or in pageant; it was displayed at several convenient sites, so that the people of England could be assured that he was truly dead. An illustration of the scene can be found in an illuminated manual of the period. It shows the king lying in a litter covered in black cloth with a black canopy above him; his head is uncovered, lying on a black cushion. Two black horses, and four knights dressed in mourning, complete the picture. On its arrival in London the bier was taken to St Paul’s Cathedral where a requiem Mass was held. The coffin was then taken to a Dominican monastery at King’s Langley, 21 miles (33.8 kilometres) outside London. A later king, Henry V, ensured that Richard II was reburied in Westminster Abbey; he may have done so in order to expiate the impiety of his father, Henry Bolingbroke, in overthrowing a lawful king.

In the reign of Richard II, a splendid and dangerous sovereign, the handkerchief was introduced to England.

26

Into the woods

Robin Hood is an English native. He and his ‘merry men’ inhabit the forest, where they live by means of various laudable crimes such as robbing the rich and poaching the king’s deer. They always manage to elude the law, generally represented by the sheriff of Nottingham; they dwell in Sherwood Forest, which lies under the sheriff’s jurisdiction.

The story was current in the thirteenth century, and may have been fashioned in its early decades from attested events. In 1216 Robin Hood, a servant of the abbot of Cirencester, was accused of murder; but this may be coincidental. In 1225 the sheriff of Yorkshire seized the goods of Robert Hood or Hod, who had fled from the city of York heavily in debt to the church courts. The same sheriff was asked in that year to pursue a notorious outlaw, known as Robert of Wetherby; the fugitive was eventually hanged in chains. Were Robert of Wetherby and Robin Hood the same person? The names of Robert and Robin were more or less interchangeable. The sheriff of Yorkshire had previously been the sheriff of Nottinghamshire. So facts are conflated and reinterpreted until the point when a legend of outlawry and liberty can appear.

Robin Hood is first mentioned as the generic name for an outlaw in the justice rolls of the late thirteenth century, where he appears as ‘Robehod’ or ‘Robinhood’. He was so well known a hundred years later that the idle priest Sloth, in Piers Plowman, admits that he does not know his ‘pater noster’ but he ‘kan rymes of Robyn Hood’. Among those rhymes was one still being sung at the beginning of the fifteenth century, ‘Robyn hode in scherewode stod’. In this period the outlaw also appears as part of the chronicle of England. One chronicler asserts that he was a follower of Simon de Montfort in his insurrection against the rule of Henry III in 1263; a real outlaw, who supported de Montfort at this time, did indeed live in Sherwood Forest. But his name was Roger Godberd. Nevertheless a monkish hand, in the margins of a copy of Polychronicon, refers in 1460 to ‘a certain outlaw named Robin Hood’ who in Sherwood Forest commits innumerable robberies. Andrew of Wynton, compiling his chronicle a few years earlier, places him in Inglewood near Carlisle and then in Barnsdale.

Soon enough Robin Hood begins to appear everywhere as the epitome of the brave and self-reliant Englishman who rejects oppressive authority; he emerges in songs and ballads, in plays and in mummings. In these works he is eventually joined by the most renowned of his forest companions, Little John and Maid Marian and Friar Tuck, who between them comprise a veritable pageant play. These characters did in fact become an integral part of the May Games of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, prompting speculation that they may be essentially of pagan origin. They are more interesting, however, as representative of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The early ballads identify Robin as a sturdy ‘yeoman’, a man somewhere between small farmer and gentleman; his enemies are the sheriffs, the bishops and the archbishops. He does not wish to harm other yeomen, or even knights and squires; he will ‘beat and bind’ only the members of the secular and clerical nobility, who can be classed as rapacious landlords. It is the dream of the oppressed. Certainly Robin was not a member of the aristocracy fallen on hard times, as some of his later and more romantic chroniclers insisted. He was always a representative of the ordinary folk of the land, and in that respect the ballads might have been sung in the local tavern as often as in the knight’s hall. A roughly hewn justice or sense of morality lay behind the fights and the pursuits, the themes of disguise and revenge; the motifs of lawlessness and greenwood liberty were also part of the English dream in a land that was continually and closely administered, in particular by the strictures of royal ‘forest law’.

The woods and forests of England are a token of its ancient life, and as such have been feared and protected in equal measure. The charters of the Anglo-Saxons reveal the presence of woods that still exist. ‘Westgraf’, mentioned in 703 as part of the topography of Shottery in Warwickshire, is now Westgrove Wood in the parish of Haselor. Wanelund, a word the Vikings used when they came to Norfolk, has become Wayland Wood a little south of Watton. A charter of 682 refers to ‘the famous wood known as Cantocwudu’; it is now known as Quantockwood in Somerset. There are many other examples of an ancient presence.

Sire-wode, later known as Sherwood, stretched from Nottingham to the centre of Yorkshire. The present Birklands contains the last remnant of the medieval oak forest that covered this region; the trees are now gnarled and dry. The other forest connected to Robin, Inglewood, was also of great extent and lay between Penrith and Carlisle. These had become the natural refuge of outlaws from the king’s justice, those who were deemed to wear ‘the wolf’s head’ and could thus be instantly cut down. Yet the English have always made heroes out of robbers and cutpurses; as a result the outlaws of the forest became representative of national freedom and equality. Robin Hood is supposed in legend to have died at Kirklees in Yorkshire. But in truth he did not die. He became part of England’s mythography.

27

The suffering king

Henry Bolingbroke, now distinguished by the title of Henry IV, had obtained the throne by violence and perhaps by fraudulence. The crown on such a head will not sit easily or securely. He himself had proved that kings can be removed at will, and gain legitimacy by popular acclamation. Henry therefore courted the Lords and Commons. He promised that he would not levy taxes, and repealed some of the previous king’s more oppressive legislation. He resumed the mantle of the warrior, pledging to lead armies into Scotland and into France, and thus adopted the style of previous martial kings. He also attempted to bring God on his side, by promising the bishops that he would be the hammer of heretics.

Yet many still believed Henry to be a usurper. From the beginning of the reign rumour spread that Richard II still lived – that he was in Scotland, that he was in Wales, that he was everywhere. Dominican and Franciscan friars preached open sedition in marketplaces and taverns, with the news that the deposed king had survived. One Franciscan friar was brought before the king.

Henry: You have heard that King Richard is alive, and you are glad?

Friar: I am glad as a man is glad of the life of his friend, for I am in his debt, as are all my kin, for he was our patron and promoter.

Henry: You have said openly that he lives, and so you have excited and stirred the people against me.

Friar: No.

Henry: Tell the truth as it is in your heart. If you saw King Richard and me fighting on the battlefield together, with whom would you fight?

Friar: In truth with him. For I am more beholden to him.

Henry: Do you wish that I and all the lords of the realm were dead?

Friar: No.

Henry: What would you do if you had the victory over me?

Friar: I would make you duke of Lancaster.

Henry: Then you are not my friend.

Another interesting exchange took place with a friar.

Henry: Do you say that King Richard is alive?

Friar: I do not say that he is alive, but I say that if he is alive he is the true king of England.

Henry: He resigned.

Friar: He resigned against his will, in prison, which is against the law.

Henry: He was deposed.

Friar: When he was king, he was taken by force and put into prison, and despoiled of his realm, and you have usurped the crown.

At the conclusion of this spirited interview the king lost his temper and cried out, ‘By my head I shall have your head!’ So it proved.

The fact that Henry felt it necessary and expedient to confront these friars in person suggests how seriously he considered any such rumour or rumours to be. He could not be safe – he could not be an anointed king – if Richard were believed to be alive.

In the early months of 1400 some Ricardian loyalists attempted an insurrection by riding on Windsor. They were dispersed and fled westwards, where eventually they were surrounded and despatched by the citizens of Cirencester and Bristol. The king’s punishment was no more merciful. One of the accused, Sir Thomas Blount, was hanged at Smithfield for a minute or so before being cut down; he was then ordered to sit in front of a great fire while the executioner came to him with a razor in his hand. After begging the prisoner’s pardon he knelt down, opened up his stomach with his razor, and took out the bowels. Blount was asked if he would like a drink. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘for I do not know where I should put it.’ The executioner tied the bowels with a string so that, in the words of a contemporary, ‘the wind of the heart should not escape’; then he threw them into the fire. One of the bystanders shouted out in derision, ‘Go seek a master that can save you’. Blount cried that ‘I shall die in the service of my sovereign lord, the noble king Richard!’ The executioner cut off his head.

Yet the severity of the punishment did not deter other rebels. In the autumn of 1401 an attempt was made to assassinate Henry, by means of an ‘infernal machine’ with poisoned spikes placed in his bed. The plan fared no better than the attempt by another assassin to smear his saddle with a deadly poison. Yet Henry was aware that dangerous forces were working against him.

Protests grew of a different kind. Despite the king’s early promise to avoid taxation, he was soon obliged to break his word. In the parliament of 1401 the chief justice revealed that the deposed king’s ‘treasure’, if such it was, had disappeared into thin air. The real costs of defending and administering the realm were increasing to such an extent that the king was already heavily in debt. The Commons eventually granted his request for aid by taxation, but in return they submitted various petitions and complaints; only when these appeals were granted was their consent to taxation obtained. This would be the pattern for all of Henry’s parliaments. He would receive money only when he satisfied the demands of the Commons. In that sense he was not a strong king. The parliament of 1399, however illegally assembled and constituted, had in effect sanctioned the coronation of a new sovereign. Why should it not now attempt to curb that monarch’s power?

In the summer of 1403 his erstwhile allies, the Percy family, rebelled against his rule. They joined a Welsh prince, Owen Glendower, who had formally defied the English king. Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, and his son, Hotspur, had been charged with the defence of the north against Scottish raiders. They had hoped by their early support of Henry’s invasion to enjoy the spoils of victory. To their surprise and alarm, however, they found themselves obliged to maintain the defences of their northern lands without any proportionate help from Henry. It had been rumoured in the parliament house that the Percy family had been granted £60,000 from the king. They denied this, claiming that they had received only £20,000. Where had the money gone?

Hotspur had come to Westminster, at the end of 1402, and demanded more money in the presence of the king. The result was a bitter confrontation. One chronicler asserts that the king punched Hotspur in the face, while another reports that he drew a dagger upon him. Whatever the truth of the matter, their alliance was broken. The Percys had another grievance against the king, in theory more serious but in practice a convenient excuse for their rebellion. They accused the king of betraying his oath. He had promised them, on first landing in Yorkshire, that he had no designs on the throne. This was in later weeks found to be a palpable fiction. But from the beginning they must have been at least aware of the possibility of Richard’s overthrow.

In the summer of 1403 Hotspur gathered an army at Chester, and proclaimed that King Richard was still alive. This was the familiar rallying cry for all those who opposed the king. Owen Glendower was poised to move from Wales, and Henry Percy was mustering his forces in the north. The king moved rapidly and expeditiously. He sent an army to Shrewsbury, the town where the rebels were supposed to muster. When Hotspur arrived there, he found the gates shut against him. While he paused outside the town, the king’s army advanced. The opposing forces met at Berwick Field, 2 miles (3 kilometres) outside Shrewsbury. Hotspur had with him 1,000 archers, and he placed them on top of a ridge from which they would be able to see the king’s men approaching. Henry had taken the precaution of asking two of his prominent supporters to wear his livery, since he knew well enough that he was the real target of Hotspur; if three Henries were on the field, it might prove confusing.

The king’s men advanced up the slope, and were met by thousands of arrows shot from the longbows of the Cheshire men. The sky grew dark, and the carnage began. The king’s men fell, according to one chronicler, ‘as fast as autumn leaves fall in autumn after the hoar frost’. On the death of one of the king’s commanders, the earl of Stafford, the vanguard of the royal army gave way and began to flee. Henry now had to act promptly to prevent a rout and bloody defeat. So he gave orders for the main body of the army to advance, and he threw himself into the action.

‘There was such slaughter’, one chronicler wrote, ‘that the like had not been seen in England for a long time.’ The royal soldiers seemed to prevail, and Hotspur staked everything on a charge against the king. Henry fell back, so that Hotspur and his followers were lost in the general mêlée. When they faltered, they were cut down. Hotspur was among the dead. The king’s son, Henry, received a wound to his skull. Yet he lived. He was one of the victors to celebrate the king’s triumph. It seemed that Henry IV had truly been anointed by God.

Two years after the battle of Berwick Field, however, another insurrection emerged in the north. The archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, rose up against royal government and issued a manifesto or list of grievances to the effect that Henry was demanding too much taxation; the burden upon his subjects, secular and clerical, had become insupportable.

It was not a successful rebellion, and within a few days the forces of the archbishop forsook him or were taken into custody. The earl of Northumberland, having survived his son’s defeat outside Shrewsbury, was again implicated in the uprising and fled to Scotland. Scrope himself was captured and beheaded, part of Henry’s crude and brutal attempt to beat off all opposition. Yet the murder of an archbishop was, in the context of the time, an act of blasphemy; it invited comparisons with the murder of Thomas Becket in the thirteenth century. Henry IV avoided much of the public obloquy that fell upon Henry II, but his private character was more severely affected. To the insecurity of his throne was added the impurity of sacrilege.

The death of the archbishop weighed on his conscience. He was riding his horse on the afternoon of 8 June 1405 – the day of Richard Scrope’s execution – when he was struck by some force so powerful that ‘it seemed to him that he had felt an actual blow’. That night he suffered a nightmare in which he cried out ‘Traitors! Traitors! You have thrown fire over me!’ When his attendants reached him, he complained that his skin was burning. This was the time when he became afflicted with a mysterious illness that was rumoured to be leprosy; since the sickness came and went over the next few years, that is unlikely to be the true diagnosis. It is more probable that Henry had contracted syphilis. As a young man he had gone on crusade to the Holy Land, and the crusaders were notorious for carrying back the venereal disease.

Yet he had passed through the fire, and from 1406 onwards there were no serious attempts to take the throne. He remained cautious; he remained stubborn; he was ever vigilant. He realized, unlike his predecessor, that he did not have the power or the resources to confront the great magnates of the land; so he equivocated, and he compromised. He permitted his nobles to enjoy a measure of independence and influence that had been denied to them in Richard’s reign. He allowed himself to be in part ruled by a council of notables. He was a good manager of men. The Crown was poor, and the treasury all but exhausted; local law was not kept, and the districts of the country were ruled by local faction. The possibility of riot and robbery was always close. Yet the king did not fall. It might be said that he muddled through, were it not for the fact that his abiding aim was to preserve his own authority and to maintain a new national dynasty. In these respects, he was successful.

His hopes devolved upon his eldest son. Henry of Monmouth, prince of Wales, had been wounded in the skull at the battle of Berwick Field, but this wound did nothing to dampen his martial fervour. He loved battle, and lived for warfare. From the age of fourteen he had served, and succeeded, in various battles and skirmishes against the Welsh insurgents. He joined the king’s council in 1406, on his return from Wales, and at once took a leading part in affairs. He was nineteen years old, and of course gathered about him the younger members of the nobility. One chronicler noted ‘the great recourse of the people unto him, of whom his court was at all times more abundant than the King his father’s’. As such he was seen as the unofficial ‘opposition’ to the already ageing king and his advisers, inclined to more purposeful and energetic activity both at home and abroad. It was the dynamic of youth against age, hope and optimism against experience and fatigue.

The king himself, beset by illness, steadily withdrew from public affairs. He left his palace at Westminster and retired to the archbishop of Canterbury’s residence at Lambeth; then he moved further out to Windsor. In this period, from the beginning of 1410 to the end of 1411, the prince of Wales successfully administered the kingdom on his father’s behalf. An expeditionary force was sent to assist the duchy of Burgundy against the depredations of the French. At the same time a determined effort was made to resolve the finances of the king. In September 1411 it is reported that the prince approached his father and advised him to abdicate ‘because he could no longer apply himself to the honour and profit of the realm’.

But then Henry IV struck back. He could not permit his royal identity to be put at risk. What else did he have left, after a decade of weary power? While breath lasted in him, he would rule. At the end of the year some of the prince’s supporters were arrested. A parliament was called, in the course of which a motion was proposed that the king should abdicate in favour of his son. It was debated, with all due decorum, but then rejected. It seemed that the prince had been outwitted. The rumour then spread that the prince was contemplating open revolt, thus reawakening fears of civil war. The rumour was quashed. It was then whispered that the prince had confiscated money due to the English garrison at Calais. In the summer of 1412, he came to London to deny this and to defy his enemies; but he brought with him an army or what was called ‘a huge people’.

The prince was also accompanied by his favourite young lords. He was wearing a peculiar costume of blue satin which, according to the translator of his first biography into English, was punctuated by ‘eyelets’ or round holes from each of which a needle was hanging upon a thread of silk. The significance of this dress is not immediately clear.

He strode into Westminster Hall, and told his supporters to remain there while he sought the king. He found him in a chamber and asked for a private interview; in the presence of four courtiers Henry asked his son ‘to show the effect of his mind’. Whereupon the prince made a long and impassioned speech, at the end of which he went down on his knees and produced a dagger. ‘Father,’ he is reported to have said, ‘I desire you in your honour of God, and for the easing of your heart, here before your knees to slay me with this dagger. My lord and father, my life is not so desirous to me that I would live one day that I should be to your displeasure.’ There was more to the same effect, a peroration that reduced the sick king to tears. Father and son were thus reconciled.

This scene is rendered in the second part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, a play that with its successor Henry V has more than any other preserved the image of this age. Whether it is a faithful image is another matter. Nevertheless the pictures of the young Henry carousing with Falstaff and Bardolf, of Justice Shallow and Mistress Quickly, of Pistol and Doll Tearsheet, are now effectively part of English history. It was said that the prince worshipped at the altars both of Venus and of Mars. Since his youth and early maturity were spent in fighting wars in Scotland and in Wales, Mars must have been in the ascendant.

The mutual respect between father and son was not destined to survive for long. Six months after this affecting interview Henry IV, worn out by guilt and illness, died in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. In his will, drawn up two years before, he had described himself in English as a ‘sinful wretch’, a ‘sinful soul’ and ‘never worthy to be a man’ whose life had been ‘misspent’. These are not the traditional testamentary words and reveal a human being who was suffering a severe sense of spiritual unworthiness. Henry IV was, after all, unique among English kings in having killed one monarch and one archbishop. Yet he had survived, albeit only to the age of forty-six. He had faced down rebellions and conspiracies; there had been attempts made on his life, and efforts to force him to abdicate. But in the end he confounded his enemies. He had instituted a royal dynasty – the house of Lancaster, part of the Plantagenet legacy – that would endure for three generations.

The king’s body was washed, his brain and his bowels were removed; he was then embalmed in a mixture of myrrh, aloes, laurel flower and saffron. He was wound in strips of waxed linen before being dressed in a long robe. His brown beard was smoothed over the throat, and the crown placed upon his head. The right hand clutched his golden orb, while the left hand touched his sceptre. In this state he was taken down to the cathedral at Canterbury where he was buried and where his tomb can still be seen.

28

Old habits

The world was in a condition of decline and decay; there was no ‘progress’, no ‘evolution’ and no ‘development’. If you needed an image of medieval thought, it would be that of the slow movement of a descending spiral. Everywhere you looked, suffering and violence and corruption held the mastery. That was the state of the earth. The most that could be hoped for was stability and steadiness; the degeneration might therefore be arrested for a moment. The four humours of man must be held in balance; the universe itself was established upon the harmonious union of the four elements, the cold earth for example having an affinity with the cold water. The manifest uncertainties of life, and the anxiety aroused by them, compounded the need for stability.

Order was the first principle, sustaining the great chain of being. That is why so much concern was attested for hierarchy and degree, with all the ‘estates’ of society carefully designated and maintained. Nothing must get out of balance. The past was revered beyond measure. Historical writing was recognized as a set of lessons or moral illustrations. The great writers were those who most closely imitated previous masters. The philosophers of the past were more acute, the architects more subtle and the rulers more eloquent. The medieval delight in ritual and ceremony was in itself a veneration of custom.

Just as medieval law was based upon precedent, so medieval society was governed by habit. Custom was the great law of life. The earliest written records show its importance. In the sixth century Aethelbert, the king of Kent, described his laws as those which had been long accepted and established; this would mean in practice that a large body of oral tradition was passed from generation to generation by the men of Kent. The witan or Anglo-Saxon assembly was to be made up of the wisest men, namely those who ‘knew how all things stood in the land in their forefathers’ days’. An eleventh-century treatise in Anglo-Saxon affirms that the landowner should ‘always know what the ancient tradition of the land is, and what the custom of the people is’. Surely ‘custom’ would go back into prehistoric times? This atavism was the expression of a deeply communal society, whereby the ties binding people together were almost unbreakable.

In the feudal society of the Normans the serf or villein was also known as consuetudinarius or custumarius, meaning ‘a man of custom’. His rights and duties were upheld by a body of customary law that would not allow outright oppression or enslavement. It would perhaps be better to say that the people of England lived by custom and not by law. Rights and duties were perpetual. No lord, however great, would willingly violate such a tradition. It would be against nature. At an important trial in 1072 the bishop of Chichester, Aethelric, was brought in a cart to expound and explain ‘the old customs of the laws’. So a continuity was maintained even after William the Conqueror’s invasion. It could not be otherwise. It was the essential life of the country. The unanswerable complaint of the labourer or the villager was that ‘we have never been accustomed to do this!’

Another aspect of this historical piety may be mentioned. Any institutional or administrative change, introduced by the king and council, had to be explained as a return to some long-lost tradition. Any innovation that had endured for twenty or thirty years then in turn became part of ancient custom. Nothing was good because it was new. It was good because it was old. It was closer to the golden age of the world. So the existing structure of things had at all costs to be protected. Any piece of legislation was said to be a ‘declaration’ of the existing law, the revelation of something previously hidden. In the reign of Henry III the barons of the realm announced ‘Nolumus leges Angliae mutari’ – ‘we do not wish the laws of England to be changed’. Government itself was established upon habitual forms and institutions. The Black Book or royal household manual of 1478, in the reign of Edward IV, urged the treasurer to seek out ‘good, old, sad [serious], worshipful and profitable rules of the court used before time’.

Custom was therefore immemorial. In the words of the period it was ‘from time out of mind, about which contrary human memory does not exist’. It was expected that the same practice and habitual activity would go on forever until the day of doom. There was no reason to envisage anything else. That final day might in effect be the day when the customary round grew ragged and creaked to a halt. Who could tell?

Customs could be of inexplicable mystery. If the king passed over Shrivenham Bridge, then in Wiltshire, the owner of the land was supposed to bring to him two white domestic cocks with the words ‘Behold, my lord, these two white capons which you shall have another time but not now’. If a whale was stranded on the coast near Chichester, it belonged to the bishop except for the tongue, which was taken to the king; if a whale landed anywhere else along the shores of his diocese, the bishop was permitted to have only the right flipper. There were urban, as well as country, customs. At Kidderminster in Worcestershire, on the day of the election of the bailiff, the town was controlled for one hour by the populace; they spent the time throwing cabbage stalks at one another before pelting the bailiff and his procession with apples. The porters of Billingsgate decreed that any stranger entering their market was obliged to salute a wooden post set up there and pay them sixpence; the man was then adopted by two ‘godparents’ among the porters. If an unmarried man was condemned to death in London, he was pardoned if a woman applied for his release on condition that he married her.

The nation itself represented the nexus of custom with custom, the shifting patterns of habitual activity. This may not be a particularly exciting philosophy of history but it is important to avoid the shibboleth of some fated or providential movement forward.

29

The warrior

Henry of Monmouth came to the throne, as Henry V, with the determination to restore the foundations of the royal finances and to deal with the old enemy of France. He was set to renew ‘bone governaunce’ or good government, with an especial intention to redress injustice and corruption. He had youth and vigour. A French visitor to the court remarked that he resembled a priest rather than a soldier; he was lean, and fair complexioned, with an oval face and short cropped brown hair. Certainly he had the look of an ascetic. On the night of his father’s death he consulted a recluse at Westminster Abbey, to whom he confessed all his sins.

He was crowned on Passion Sunday, 9 April 1413, a day of hail and snow. The weather was said to presage a reign of cold severity. There can be no doubt that Henry V was driven by a sense of divine right as well as of duty. All was changed. He abandoned his youthful pursuits and almost overnight, according to the chroniclers, became a grave and serious king. He acquired a reputation for piety and for the solemn observance of ceremonies; until his marriage, seven years later, he remained chaste. He established several monastic foundations of an ascetic nature, where the daily exhalation of prayer was meant to support the Lancastrian dynasty. His devotion also had an aesthetic cast. The annalist, John Stowe, recorded that ‘he delighted in songs, metres and musical instruments; insomuch that in his chapel, among his private prayers, he used our Lord’s prayer, certain psalms of David, with diverse hymns and canticles’. When he went to war in France, he took with him organists and singers.

He spoke English naturally, unlike his father, and in that respect set the standard for the written records of the country. He was something of a martinet, peremptory and commanding. One of his letters to an ambassador, Sir John Tiptoft, opens succinctly with ‘Tiptoft, I charge you by the faith that you owe me …’ ‘Tiptoft’, that brief salutation, is of the essence. ‘A king’, Thomas Hoccleve wrote, ‘from mochil speche him refreyne.’ He was clipped and precise. He was also an efficient administrator, who looked to the details of his policies; he demanded much in taxation from his kingdom, but he never squandered money unwisely. He maintained cordial relations with the most important nobles, and worked well with the parliament house. He proved that, with firm oversight, medieval governance was not inherently unstable or incoherent.

The test of his religious commitment came a few months after his coronation, when he was obliged to confront the forces of heresy. The activity of the Lollards has been examined in earlier pages, but it reached a point of crisis in the early months of 1413. During the king’s first parliament a proclamation was pinned to the doors of the London churches stating that, if the brethren were to face persecution and outlawry, 100,000 men would rise up to protect them. In the consequent state of alarm and insecurity one of the king’s own friends, Sir John Oldcastle, was accused of harbouring and promoting heretics. It is a matter of some irony, therefore, that the original name of Falstaff in Shakespeare’s play of Henry V, written almost 200 years after the events related, was Oldcastle. Shakespeare had portrayed him as Henry’s boon companion in the years of the alehouse and the brothel.

The proclamations fixed to the church doors were traced back to this now earnest man. One of his chaplains was preaching Lollardy, and Oldcastle himself had been caught in possession of certain heretical tracts. The king tried to argue with him, and to persuade him to recant, but he refused to do so. He was taken to the Tower in the autumn of 1413 and, at his subsequent trial, repeated the Lollard disregard for confession and the doctrine of transubstantiation. He was judged to be a heretic and passed over to the secular arm for burning. The king intervened once more and granted him forty days for the further searching of his conscience, but in this period Oldcastle managed to escape from his confinement.

He spent two months in hiding, somewhere in the purlieus of London, during which period he conceived a plot to kill the king and his brothers before leading a general insurrection of Lollards. Messages were secretly conveyed to the brethren, asking them to meet at St Giles’s Fields just outside the city. But the secret was revealed to someone in authority. On the evening of 9 January 1414, the king moved with his forces to the fields. As the Lollards marched towards the city, they were dispersed and consigned to Newgate Prison. Thirty-eight of them were drawn on hurdles from Newgate and hanged in the fields, on gallows newly built for that purpose.

It had not in any case been a popular insurrection, with perhaps no more than a few hundred participants. Yet it did effectively destroy any sympathy with the Lollard movement among the general population; heresy itself was now considered to be equivalent to rebellion.

Oldcastle himself evaded capture for almost four years; he was eventually seized in the neighbourhood of Welshpool and taken to London where he was hanged above a burning fire that consumed the gallows as well as the victim. In his last words before this painful death he declared that he would rise again after three days. In truth his resurrection took a little longer. In the sixteenth century he became celebrated as a proto-martyr of Protestantism; that is one of the reasons why Shakespeare felt obliged to change his name to Falstaff.

In a sense, however, the insurrection was a distraction. The young king’s reign was primarily defined by war. He gathered around him a group of young men who saw in battle and victory the foundations of glory. Principal among them were his three brothers, wholly committed to the success of the dynasty. War was considered to be the highest duty, and greatest achievement, of any king. It was this fervour, or lust, that effectively reopened the Hundred Years War after the interval of the previous two reigns. Almost at once the new king moved against France. He had been made duke of Aquitaine in 1399, as part of his patrimony; now he wished to reclaim the lands of Gascony, Calais, Guienne, Poitou and Ponthieu that had been granted to the English Crown in the treaty of 1360.

By the summer of 1415 all was ready for the French endeavour. The parliament house had furnished the necessary funds without any of the usual misgivings; the troops and the ships were requisitioned efficiently, and it seems that the nation supported this show of strength and determination by the young king. Yet not all of his subjects were ready to pay fealty to him. Some still questioned the legitimacy of the house of Lancaster and, in the days before the launching of the military expedition, certain nobles tried to organize a rebellion. They were forestalled, and swiftly executed. No one else would ever again threaten the reign of Henry V.

He sailed to France with an army of 8,000 men. There were archers, both mounted and on foot; there were ‘men-at-arms’, knights and esquires in full body armour complete with lance, sword and dagger. There were foot soldiers, fletchers, bowyers, carpenters, priests, surgeons, gunners and engineers. The two latter were needed for the prosecution of siege warfare, a technique for which Henry had trained himself in Wales. A royal officer, known as ‘the grand sergeanty’, was also on board; his sole job was to hold the king’s head in case of seasickness. It has been calculated that approximately 15,000 horses were transported to France. No female followers of the camp were allowed to sail. The punishment for any prostitute found among the soldiers was for all her money to be taken and for one of her arms to be broken before her being driven off with staves.

The expedition left Southampton on 11 August, accompanied by a flock of swans, and set sail for the coast of Normandy; the duchy belonged to Henry’s family, or so he claimed, and to land there was itself an act of proprietorship. He laid siege to the town of Harfleur, at the mouth of the river Seine, but it did not prove to be an easy victory; the town held out for five weeks, in which period Henry’s men suffered dysentery from the eating of unripe fruit. Yet he prevailed; the leaders of the town surrendered, and Henry promptly laid plans to turn it into an English colony. Since Harfleur was connected to Rouen and to Paris by the river, it was in a desirable position.

In his campaigns he was a rigid and severe disciplinarian; that is why he was successful. He planned meticulously, while retaining his command over the court administration at Westminster. Above all else he was possessed of great energy; whether in a tournament, or at a hunt, or in the field of battle, he was swift and unrelenting. He gave the impression of always being in a hurry, as if he had some strange presentiment of his early death.

From Harfleur he led his men north-east towards Calais, a distance of some 120 miles (75 kilometres); but then he received the unwelcome news that the French army was waiting for him on the right bank of the Somme. He was obliged to make a detour, marching along the left bank of the Somme until he could find a place of safe passage. The trek to Calais was supposed to have taken eight days, but only two weeks later did the English army cross the river. The king’s men were exhausted and hungry but, despite the presence of a French army shadowing them closely, he ordered them to march on to Calais. Everyone knew that he would have to confront the enemy before reaching the town.

On 24 October, he saw them; they were gathered, according to the author of The Deeds of Henry V, like a swarm of locusts near the village of Agincourt. One of the English commanders prayed aloud for 10,000 more archers, but the king told him that they had the more certain protection of God. He rested his men that night, and ordained a strict silence; the songs and music of the French could clearly be heard. At dawn he attended three Masses before mounting his horse; he wore a gold crown upon his helmet. Then he ordered his army into position. He had approximately 8,000 men against a French army of 20,000. Another crucial difference was in place; the English combatants included 6,000 archers or longbowmen, while the French had very few. They were relying upon the force of their armour. So the English were placed in a thin line across the field of battle, in the same posture as the shield wall of the Anglo-Saxons or ‘the thin red line’ at the battle of Balaclava in 1854. The heavy rain of the previous night had rendered the terrain muddy and treacherous. For three hours, from nine in the morning to midday, the two armies faced each other without moving.

Henry then took the initiative, fearing that the enemy were waiting for reinforcements. ‘Now is good time, for all England prays for us,’ he shouted, ‘and therefore be of good cheer, and let us go to our journey!’ He continued with an invocation. ‘In the name of Almighty God and St George, advance bannerer! And St George, this day your help!’ His soldiers prostrated themselves upon the ground, each of them putting a small piece of earth into his mouth to remind him that he was mortal and must one day return to dust; it was a different form of holy communion. The English archers advanced some 700 yards (640 metres), stopped, and rammed sharp pointed stakes into the soft earth as a form of protection from horses and armed knights alike. Then they took aim and fired at the massed French host with a great storm of arrows, causing immediate carnage in its ranks. The French cavalry charged, but the men and horses were wounded or impaled upon the stakes.

The body of the French army moved forward, but their great numbers made them unwieldy and confused. The arrows of the English archers continued to do their deadly work, and the riderless horses created further alarm among the men. The bodies of the dead already lay in piles upon the muddy ground, and the more nimble English soldiers were able to turn in upon the groaning mass of the enemy. Two-thirds of the remaining French army now fled. Henry was not yet certain of the victory; a third part of the army still remained on the field, and many unarmed French prisoners were held in the rear of the action. He ordered these men to be put to death, to avoid any threatening movement on their part. This was in defiance of the rules of chivalry, which forbade the execution of unarmed prisoners, and was also to the detriment of the English who could have been expected to earn sizeable ransoms from their captives. Yet Henry ordered 200 archers to carry out the work of killing. It can only be said that in the blood and heat of battle some pressing reason must have suggested itself to him. What that was, we do not know. His command was not wholly carried out, however, and many hundreds of noble prisoners survived the ordeal of the battle of Agincourt.

The king now marched unimpeded to Calais from where, after a few days’ respite, he sailed back to England. His reception in London on 23 November was a great occasion of state. 20,000 citizens met him at Blackheath, where he was hailed as ‘lord of England, flower of the world, soldier of Christ’. Two giant figures, of a man and a woman, were erected on London Bridge to welcome him; effigies of the lion and the antelope wearing the royal arms, with a choir of angels singing ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord’, greeted his progress. Other giant figures, and pageant wagons, and fanciful castles, decorated the route to St Paul’s Cathedral; the king, in a simple gown of purple, was greeted by groups of singers holding garlands. In this year, also, Henry began to wear an arched or imperial crown modelled upon that worn by the Holy Roman Emperor; it was an ‘imperial diadem of gold and precious stones’, adverting to the fact that he had regained an imperial kingship.

The victory was not immediately followed by an advantageous truce. No overwhelming victory has ever had such tenuous result. The sinews that had been stiffened were now relaxed again, and the blood summoned was permitted to subside. Yet the reputation of the king was greatly strengthened; he did now seem to be one favoured and protected by God, and the right of his dynasty to rule was manifestly confirmed. At a stroke he had become the leading figure in the royal politics of Europe. On a more practical level the parliament house bestowed on him a new grant of taxation, and guaranteed him for life the excise on exports of wool and leather.

The French attempted to recapture Harfleur both by land and by sea, but a decisive naval battle in the summer of 1416 proved their undoing. Henry prided himself on his navy; he was the first king since Alfred to create a national force at sea, and by the end of 1416 he possessed six great ships, eight barges and ten single-masted sailing vessels known as balingers.

With these he launched his second invasion of France in February 1417. He had come to claim the throne of France ‘de facto et realiter’; it was his by right. He undertook a sequence of sieges, beginning with the town of Caen, slowly moving southwards until he arrived at Falaise, best known as the birthplace of William the Conqueror. He was returning to the land of his now remote predecessor, and in the process had effectively seized Normandy. Then he moved on to the capital of the duchy, Rouen; the siege lasted for almost six months, creating intense misery for the citizens. According to a popular verse of the period:

They ate dogs, they ate cats,

They ate mice, horses and rats

For thirty pence went a rat …

Rouen surrendered on 19 January 1419. The way to Paris now lay open. Some inconclusive negotiations took place between the two sides; facing Henry was the king of France, Charles VI, together with his son and successor known as the ‘dauphin’. These two men were joined by the duke of Burgundy, who had formed an unlikely pact with the dauphin in an effort to repel the English. But the allies fell out; at a meeting arranged upon a bridge, one of the dauphin’s retinue killed the duke. It may have been a plot or, as was claimed, an accident; the result was the same. With his enemies in disarray Henry came up to the gates of Paris and demanded the French crown. Who could now deny it to him? The new duke of Burgundy was inexperienced, the dauphin was in disgrace, and the king of France was intermittently insane.

After much debate a treaty was agreed in the spring of 1420 in which it was confirmed that Charles VI would disinherit his son and declare the English king to be his successor. Henry V would marry the king’s daughter Katherine, so that any male child would then automatically become king of France as well as of England. It was on the face of it a great victory; Henry had won more than any of his predecessors. Subsequent events, however, would prove that the concord was ultimately unstable. Why should the French agree to be ruled by a king at Westminster? Serious misgivings also existed, in some quarters of the English parliament, about the wisdom of the English domination of France; the costs of war were very large. The price of maintaining power would also be high. It was unwise to tangle with the affairs of the French.

At the early date of 1417 the clergy had ceased to pray for the king’s success in foreign warfare; the parliaments of 1420 and 1421 reverted to their former ways and refused to grant money for the enterprise. The chronicler of the period, Adam of Usk, finished his narrative with the exclamation, ‘but, woe is me! Mighty men and treasure of the realm will be most miserable foredone about this business.’ Some compensations were available, most notably for the great knights and the soldiers of fortune who brought back treasure and booty. Thomas Montague, the earl of Salisbury, wrote to the king that ‘we broughten home the fairest and greatest prey of beasts as all those saiden that saw them that ever they saw’. He returned with riches, in other words. Whether this heartened the clergy and the yeomen of England is another matter.

Fears existed about English sovereignty itself. What if one treasurer, for example, were to superintend the revenues of both countries bound in an intricate embrace? What if the king, or his successor, appointed a French noble to that task? These may have been groundless fears, but nonetheless they existed. It had become obvious that the king was already spending more time in France than in England, to the detriment of national interests.

The proof is to be found in the fact that Henry was obliged to consolidate his gains in France with further military campaigns. He possessed, or occupied, the duchy of Normandy together with the area known as Vexin – the region of northwest France on the right bank of the Seine. But there were still provinces ruled by the duke of Burgundy, and others governed by the dauphin. There could be no peace in a divided land.

Henry married Katherine of France, or Katherine of Valois, soon after the treaty with her father; they entered Paris in state and moved into the Louvre Palace. The king of course wished to crown his wife in Westminster, and on 23 February 1421 she was led to the abbey. The Valois and Plantagenet dynasties were united.

Four months later Henry was in France once more, to counter French resistance and insurrection. He was obliged to fight for his gains, but during the siege of the town of Meaux he became ill; he relapsed into a fever and grew steadily weaker. He sensed that death was approaching, and he made a codicil to his will. He now had a son, only eight months old, and the child was given into the protection of one of his brothers. The duke of Gloucester would guide and support the infant Henry. On the last day of August 1422 the king died. The corpse was brought to London, and was buried with due solemnity in the abbey.

No king won such plaudits from his contemporaries as Henry V. The misgivings about his wars in France were forgotten for the sake of celebrating his martial valour. He was devout as well as magnificent, chaste as well as earnest. He was as generous to his friends as he was stern to his enemies; he was prudent and magnanimous, modest and temperate. He was the very model of a medieval king. Yet there are some who have doubted that verdict. Shakespeare’s play Henry V can be interpreted in quite a different spirit as an account of a military tyrant who staked all on vainglorious conquest in France. What did he finally achieve? Once his French conquests were dissipated, and the dream of a dual monarchy dissolved, very little was left to celebrate. All was done for the pride of princes.

One more elusive and unintended consequence, of the revival of the Hundred Years War by Henry V, can be recorded. The language of England was now spoken by all the king’s subjects. The letters of the king were always written in English, and the writer of The Deeds of Henry V invoked Anglia nostra or ‘our England’. The first document of royal administration written in English is dated in 1410. The London Guild of Brewers began to record its proceedings in English from the early 1420s, citing the fact that ‘the greater part of the Lords and the trusty Commons have begun to make their matters be noted down in our mother tongue’.

The archbishops of Canterbury now spoke routinely of ‘the Church of England’ as an identifiable element of the Universal Church, and at a Church council in 1414 it was declared that ‘whether a nation be understood as a people marked off from others by blood relationship and habit of unity, or by peculiarities of language … England is a real nation’. The fact that the matter had to be asserted suggests that in previous periods this nationhood had not been self-evident. In the fifteenth century, too, there were persistent attempts to contrast the prosperous kingdom of England with the parlous state of France. It was a way of escaping from the inheritance of the French-speaking royalty and a French-speaking court that had shaped the governance of the three previous centuries.

The first surviving letter written in English dates from the winter of 1392. A slightly later epistle, also written in English, is of more human interest. It was ‘written at Calais on this side the sea, the first day of June, when every man was gone to his dinner, and the clock smote noon and all our household cried after me and bade me come down. Come down to dinner at once! And what answer I gave them ye know it of old.’ You can hear the voices. Come down! Come down!

30

How others saw us

The English were pronounced by other nations to be guilty of the sin of pride; that was their most prominent characteristic. The fourteenth-century French chronicler Jean Froissart described ‘the great haughtiness of the English, who are affable to no other nation than their own’. A German knight, Nicholas von Poppelau, visited the country in 1484 and complained that ‘the English think they are the wisest people in the world’ and that ‘the world does not exist apart from England’. Fifteen years later a Venetian traveller stated that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves and of everything belonging to them’. Whenever they see a handsome stranger, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman’.

Other nations were sure that the English had tails. The Greeks of Sicily, who were obliged to entertain the presence of English crusaders in 1190, referred to them as ‘the tailed Englishmen’. At the end of the thirteenth century the Scottish forces, besieged in Dunbar Castle, shouted from the battlements, ‘You English dogs with long tails! We will kill you all and cut off your tails!’ It is possible that the offence was originally that of long hair, worn down the back like a tail, and gradually became a term of general opprobrium.

The French accused the English of being drunken and perfidious; the notion of la perfide Albion, current in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, has a long history. They were aloof; they were phlegmatic; they were insensitive to their own suffering, and to the sufferings of others. They were not afraid of death. That is why they quarrelled with so much ferocity; they robbed and murdered one another quite openly. Sometimes they even killed their king. So they were known for their violence.

The English themselves admitted many faults. The author of Vita Edwardi Secundi, writing early in the fourteenth century, maintained that his countrymen excelled ‘in pride, in craft and in perjury’. Ranulf Higden of Chester, in the same period, described his compatriots as drunken, greedy and dishonest. Their drunkenness was a common cause of complaint, so often described and condemned that it became almost a caricature. A papal envoy to England wrote in 1473 that ‘in the morning they are as devout as angels, but after dinner they are like devils’. Certain national characteristics may never change.

31

A simple man

If Henry’s son had been declared king immediately on the death of his father, he would have been crowned in his swaddling clothes. It was deemed prudent, therefore, to wait until he had reached the age of understanding before he was anointed. Nothing spells disaster so much as a child king, however, surrounded by magnates who consult no interest but their own. Indeed in the course of his long reign, lasting for almost forty years, the fortunes of the ruling houses of England went through so many bewildering vicissitudes – so many reversals and surprises, so many victories and defeats – that the nineteenth-century critic, William Hazlitt, described the country as a ‘perfect beargarden’. This was the era in which were fought the series of battles that have become known as the Wars of the Roses.

Three brothers supervised the minority of the infant king. They can be introduced as the dramatis personae. The first of them, the duke of Gloucester, was his younger uncle; it was he to whom Henry V had entrusted the life and safety of his son. His older uncle, the duke of Bedford, had been chosen by the dying king to protect and enlarge the conquered territories of France; the war continued as before. Henry Beaufort, the child of John of Gaunt and therefore the king’s great-uncle, was bishop of Winchester; he became chancellor of England and therefore its principal officer. He had been born illegitimate but the subsequent marriage of John of Gaunt to his mother, Katherine Swynford, rendered him legitimate.

Brothers, legitimate or illegitimate, may fall out. Gloucester wished to be given the title of ‘regent’, effectively assuming control of the country. Instead at Bedford’s request he was only named as ‘protector’, obliged to yield precedence whenever his elder brother returned from France to England. Gloucester also quarrelled with Beaufort over the direction of the kingdom, and their rivalry reached such a pitch that in 1425 it precipitated them almost into internecine war. Beaufort gathered his army of retainers in Southwark, where his palace lay, and Gloucester ordered the mayor of London to close London Bridge against them. Bedford had to come over from France in order to arrange a compromise between them. They were dogs fighting over the bone of power.

The new king, Henry VI, was formally crowned in the winter of 1429. The eight-year-old boy was carried into the abbey in the arms of his tutor; this suggests that he was a little frail, but he managed to survive the strain of the lengthy ceremony and walked down the aisle unaided at its conclusion. It has been said that he remained a child all his life. At the end of 1431 he was taken to France, according to the treaty agreed by his father, where he was crowned in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. On the head of this young boy the lines of Valois and Plantagenet royalty had come together. At barely the age of ten he was the only male monarch ever to be king both of England and of France.

It is significant however that, in the year before he came to France, the figure of Joan of Arc emerged as the inspiration and hope of the French army. That is one of the reasons why Henry was so prominently displayed in Paris. In May 1429, in a series of brilliantly executed skirmishes, she had lifted the English siege of Orleans and proceeded to recapture other French towns that had submitted to the enemy. Orleans had been the key to the English strategy, its fall meant to anticipate the general defeat of the French army. That victory had been snatched away. In a letter Joan wrote at the end of June to the citizens of Tournai, she declared that ‘the Maiden lets you know that here, in eight days, she has chased the English out of all the places they held on the river Loire by attack or other means; they are dead or prisoners or discouraged in battle’. She had begun a process that would end in the complete unravelling of the victories of the previous reign. At Joan’s urgent instigation the dauphin rode in triumph to the cathedral in Rheims, where he was crowned as Charles VII. Two kings, Henry VI and Charles VII, were now claiming supremacy over the French people. It would take another twenty years to assign victory to one of them.

The affairs of France, ever since the death of Henry V, had not been well managed. Without the presence of this inspiring king, the enthusiasm for conquest seems slowly to have been dissipated. Disputes over strategy, between Bedford and Gloucester, did not augur well; Bedford was also denied the finances that he needed. It was said in the parliament house and elsewhere that French actions should be subsidized by the taxpayers of France. Among the English themselves the virtues and advantages of a dual monarchy were openly questioned. What was the point of owning or seizing territories in France when there was so much amiss in England? The king of England should reside in England, not in Paris or in Normandy.

Yet the war continued, the French and English possessing neither the will nor the resources effectively to decide the matter. Charles VII entered an alliance with the new duke of Burgundy, formally apologizing for the assassination of the duke’s predecessor and promising to punish the guilty parties. Those areas of France under the influence of Burgundy now reverted to their allegiance to the Valois king, and Charles could truly claim to be the king of most if not all of the French. In the process Burgundy had deserted his English allies, in a move that profoundly shocked the infant king; Henry had burst into tears when he read the letter from the duke renouncing fealty. More than twenty years later he still recalled the event. ‘He abandoned me in my boyhood,’ he said, ‘despite all his oaths to me, when I had never done him any wrong.’ We might notice here the innate simplicity of the remark.

The story of Joan of Arc is well known. Bedford led the war of words against her, denouncing her as a witch and an unnatural hag in the service of the devil. She had declared that the purpose of her mission was to recapture Orleans and expedite the coronation of the French monarch; after she had completed the latter object she seems to have faltered. She was wounded during a military skirmish in Paris, and was then captured by a force of soldiers led by John of Luxemburg. He sold her to Bedford, claiming a large ransom, and the Maid of Orleans was put on trial for witchcraft. The French king made no attempt to save her, and seems to have regarded her as no more than a casualty of war. In the spring of 1431 she was dragged to the stake in the marketplace of Rouen.

The council of nobles held together for the duration of the young king’s minority; they were all men who had served under Henry V, and the shared memory of that king was at least as strong as their individual self-interest. The uneasy triumvirate of the three brothers survived until the death of Bedford in 1435. In 1437, in his sixteenth year, Henry declared that his minority had come to an end and that he would now begin to govern for himself. It is more likely, however, that someone made the decision for him. He relied on the judgment and advice of others, and it was said that he always agreed with the last person who had spoken to him. For two years he had been coached in the rights and duties of a king. It was time now to take the centre of the stage. Beaufort and Gloucester, the pre-eminent nobles after the death of Bedford, would in theory be obliged to incline to his wishes. Beaufort had been raised from bishop to cardinal eleven years before, but his elevation still left him below the rank and power of his sovereign. In the summer of 1437 Henry VI embarked upon a grand tour of his kingdom.

So we may now survey the young king. The extant portraits, albeit somewhat idealized, display a man with a prominent jaw and a faintly pious or innocent expression. Concerning his character and judgment, no general agreement exists. He was of an honest and simple nature, but the virtues of ordinary life may not sit well upon a monarch. For some chroniclers he became the model of the saintly king, ‘without any crook of craft or untruth’; he was ‘pure and clean’, modest in success and patient in adversity. Yet to others he seemed to be a simpleton, an idiot, half-witted, a veritable ‘sheep’. Pope Pius II said of this devoted son of the Church that he was ‘more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit’. The English churchmen had been gossiping to him. In truth a fifteenthcentury king had to be aggressive and brutal; he had to possess innate authority; he had to be shrewd and courageous. Henry VI seems to have possessed none of these qualities. Those who condemned him as an imbecile and a natural fool were simply registering their disappointment. In any other sphere he would no doubt have passed as a devout and kindly man.

Of his piety itself there can be no doubt. He would never conduct business, or move his court, on a Sunday. He rebuked any of his lords who swore, and his only declamatory language was ‘Forsooth, forsooth!’ His eminent contemporary, William Caxton, wrote that he ‘made a rule that a certain dish, which represented the five wounds of Christ as it were red with blood, should be set on his table by his almoner before any other course, when he was to take refreshment; and contemplating these images with great fervour he thanked God marvellous devoutly’.

After the adhesion of the duke of Burgundy to the French cause, the endless war did not go well for the English. They still held on to Normandy, as well as parts of Gascony and Maine, but their aspirations to French supremacy were now at an end. Bedford, the commanding presence on the English side, proved impossible to replace. All the spirit had gone out of the enterprise of France. Step by step Normandy was being reclaimed by the French. It was perhaps unfortunate that Henry VI himself had no military experience or aptitude. His only visit to France was at the time of his coronation, and never once did he lead his forces into the field. He was emphatically a man of peace, more at home with his studies or his devotions; he was more intent upon his foundations, at Eton and elsewhere, or with his building works at Cambridge. In this he may not have been wholly misguided. Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, remain the most enduring manifestations of his reign.

When Paris fell to Charles VII in the spring of 1436, and the state of Normandy grew more disordered, Henry was inclined ever more favourably towards peace. Negotiations between the two sides accomplished precisely nothing, however, while the French continued their slow conquest of the disputed territories. The English did not have the men or the materials successfully to defend both Gascony and Normandy, while the central market town and garrison of Calais was always under threat from the forces of the duke of Burgundy. The French king offered a truce, and the possibility of England maintaining its control of Gascony and Normandy, on the condition that Henry VI renounced his claim to the French crown. The king and his council prevaricated, and sent out a series of confused responses. Henry’s council in Normandy said that they were dismayed and apprehensive like ‘a ship tossed about on the sea by many winds, without captain, without steersman, without rudder, without sail’. The king could be construed as the substitute for captain and steersman, rudder and sail.

Plenty of interested parties were of course ready to throw in their opinions. Beaufort and Gloucester were joined by a third such party. Richard, duke of York, had taken the place of Bedford as commander of the English forces; he was in fact Bedford’s nephew, and would continue the factional strife that already undermined English policy. In the complicated tangle of primogeniture he was now one of the likely and immediate heirs to the throne, being directly related to the fifth son of Edward III; Henry himself was descended from the fourth son. It may seem excessively obscure to a modern reader, but at the time all the protagonists knew exactly where they stood in relation to sovereignty; it was in their blood, literally, and guided their actions. Henry never trusted York.

There is a further complication. John Beaufort, the nephew of Cardinal Beaufort and already made duke of Somerset, was despatched to France in order to relieve Gascony – much to the fury of York who was already facing great disturbances in Normandy and was desperately in need of fresh resources. It is easy to see how English policy was in disarray. York and Gloucester were part of the council that favoured fresh aggression and determination in the face of French attacks; Cardinal Beaufort preferred a policy of compromise and negotiation. The king, although temperamentally in favour of peace, demurred between the two factions. Somerset set sail for France in the summer of 1443, but achieved nothing in the field; finally he had the humiliation of taking refuge with York in Rouen. His army was disbanded and he sailed home. He died in the spring of the following year, and it was widely rumoured that he had committed suicide. The last great English enterprise had been a fiasco. The members of the ‘peace party’ at Westminster felt themselves to have been vindicated.

In these unpromising circumstances Henry VI sent a personal envoy to negotiate directly with the French king.William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, had already served in the French wars and had become one of the king’s most favoured councillors. He travelled to the French court at Tours in the spring of 1444 where both sides, exhausted by war and attrition, came to a relatively easy truce for the space of ten months. The treaty was sealed with a kiss. As part of the pact Henry VI was to marry the daughter of the Duke of Anjou, one of the most powerful families at the French court; she was also the niece of the French king. Margaret of Anjou, in the company of Suffolk, sailed to England in the following year.

So there came to England one of its most forceful queens. It was not long before it was widely reported that she ruled her husband; one London chronicler, John Blocking, declared that she was cleverer than Henry and of a more powerful character. She was ‘a great and strong and active woman who spares no effort in pursuing her affairs’. She found her favourite in Suffolk, who had arranged her marriage, and together they controlled the general policy of the council. It was Margaret, for example, who played a leading role in the negotiations with the French; she was trying to bring the members of her extended family into happy unison. So it was that her husband secretly agreed to cede the province of Maine to the Valois king, in exchange for the security of a general peace. Maine had been an English possession since it had passed to Henry II in 1154 as part of his Angevin inheritance; that older Henry had been born in its capital, Le Mans. The news of its forfeiture provoked discontent and dismay among many of the king’s councillors; even the king’s envoys in France were opposed to the surrender they had come to negotiate, and insisted on a signed declaration that they had come only in the higher purpose of peace. The treaty, after much confusion and suspicion as a result of Henry’s vacillation, was finally sealed.

Gloucester, the leading figure among those who had once favoured war with France, was now in eclipse. His power and authority had been notably undermined, not least in the prosecution of his wife for witchcraft on the grounds that she had sought the king’s death by means of the black arts. It is possible that he now planned to move against Suffolk, or in some way to gain control of the king. In 1447 a parliament was summoned to Bury St Edmunds, an unusual setting for that assembly. Gloucester arrived for the opening of the proceedings but, on the day following his arrival, he was arrested in his lodgings on the charge of high treason. A few days later, he was found dead in his bed. It was widely believed he fell ill immediately after his arrest; he had been struck down by anxiety and dismay. He may have died of natural causes, in a most unnatural world. It may of course have been a case of judicial murder, at a time when such events were not uncommon.

The death of Gloucester did not enhance the king’s authority. Henry had not proved himself during his personal rule; he was as negligent in his conduct of English affairs as he had been vacillating in his prosecution of the war. He had given away to his favourites more royal lands than any of his predecessors; his debts rose higher and higher, while it was an open secret that the members of his household were purloining money from the royal income. All the perquisites of royal favour – offices, pensions and wardships among them – were being drained. On certain occasions Henry granted the same office twice to different people.

He was generous, too, in the bestowal of new honours; in the eight years between 1441 and 1449 he created ten barons, five earls, two marquises and five dukes. Even the most impartial observer must have concluded that he was unduly diluting the reserves of patronage. Existing barons and dukes might also have surmised that their rank, at the very least, was not necessarily being exalted. Henry had never known any other position than that of monarch; he took his wealth and power for granted. He did not understand the value or importance of what he bestowed. He was always ready, and even eager, to pardon people; he was following the model of his Saviour. But this generosity did not endear itself to those who believed themselves to have been wronged.

He was too weak to arbitrate between the more powerful nobles of the reign; this encouraged them to take matters into their own hands, and to solve by force or threat the disputes that should have been resolved by a strong king. As a result armed feuds between the powerful families presaged the greater civil conflict of the Wars of the Roses. The king was supposed to guide and to lead his nobles; that was part of their compact with the court. They were the natural supporters of the anointed monarch. They did not wish for a weak king, and they were more secure if a king was strong. But, if they were masterless, then all order was destroyed.

The consequences were obvious to all. With the death of the duke of Gloucester, the duke of York became the direct heir to the throne. Yet Henry still did not trust him and, to lessen his capacity for influence at court, he was despatched to Ireland as lord lieutenant. For two years York refused to take up the appointment, but in the summer of 1449 he sailed across the Irish Sea. The command of the English armies in France was then given to the new duke of Somerset, Edmund Beaufort, brother of the supposed suicide. Suffolk and Somerset were now aligned against York. York and Somerset would soon enough become rivals almost to the death. These were the fruits of Henry’s ‘personal rule’ that would end in the bloodiest dynastic dispute in English history.

A more general sense prevailed that the rule of the law had been left in abeyance. ‘The law serves of nothing else in these days,’ the men of Kent said in a declaration of 1450, ‘but to do wrong.’ All was accomplished by ‘bribery, dread or favour’. The extant letters of the period, particularly those of the Paston family, are filled with accounts of wrongdoing that went unpunished and of nobles who exercised justice (if that is what it can be called) for their own advantage. Endless stories were told of armed gangs threatening tenants, besieging manors and invading courts of justice.

John Paston wrote of one hired gang that ‘no poor man dare displease them, for whatsoever they do with their swords they make it law’. He had direct experience of such violent behaviour. In a petition to the archbishop of York he wrote of ‘a great multitude of riotous people, to the number of a thousand persons or more’ who ‘broke, despoiled, and drew down’ his manor house at Gresham; they ‘drove out my wife and servants there being, and rifled, took, and bore away all the goods and chattels’. The gang then fortified the manor, and kept out Paston himself as well as the king’s Justice of the Peace.

Another gang, commanded by William Tailboys, was under the protection of Suffolk; it will be remembered that Suffolk, with the queen, helped to control the council of the realm. Tailboys and his ‘slaughterladdes’ were accused of three murders as well as charges of trespass and assault; but Suffolk helped him to escape justice. ‘On lordship and friendship’, it was said, ‘depends all law and profit.’ The spirit of misrule prevailed over the land, and the king could do nothing about it.

When Paston’s manor house was plundered and taken, his adversary procured a royal letter asking the sheriff of Norfolk to show ‘favour’. Paston was powerless in these circumstances, and he was advised to place himself under the protection of the duke of York. In 1454 one of Henry’s knights who had done well out of the French wars, Sir John Falstolf, laid aside money to bribe a sheriff; he wanted a jury that would favour his suit in a legal case. It is clear enough that the juries of the period were, on a routine basis, bribed or intimidated.

In an interpolation to his version of The Game and the Playe of the Chesse William Caxton castigated ‘the advocates, the men of law and the attorneys of the court’, describing ‘how they turn the laws and statutes at their pleasure, how they eat the people, how they impoverish the community’. We may read for instruction a great juridical text of the period, Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae – ‘In Praise of the Laws of England’ – and even applaud the development or ‘evolution’ of justice; but in practice the law was rotten and worm-eaten. We may say the same of the parliament house and of the court. It is not to be expected that any human institution will be other than rackety and only partially competent; only in histories do they proceed with ease to their ordained end.

All these forces of disorder and injustice came to a head in 1449. In that year Henry’s authority had suffered a mortal blow when Charles VII, on the pretext that the English had broken the terms of a formal truce agreed two years earlier, marched into Normandy with the ambition of expelling the English altogether from his territories; his success was evident and immediate. The towns, hitherto occupied by the English, surrendered without a fight to the three French armies who advanced upon them from various directions.

In November 1449 the parliament house met in the face of the grave news from France and at its second session, in early 1450, the duke of Suffolk was accused of treason. It was alleged that he had planned to assist the invasion of England by Charles VII, and that he was willing to place his castle in Wallingford at the French king’s disposal. The charge may seem unrealistic, but at a time of failure and suspicion it was believed. Those responsible for the fiasco in France had to be made to pay in one form or another. At the same time the chancellor of England, Archbishop Stafford, resigned his post. Suffolk was placed in the Tower, where a bill of impeachment was drawn up against him; the king now intervened and brought these proceedings to an end. Henry could not countenance the spectacle of his chief minister and adviser being humiliated.

The Commons were not to be diverted, however, from their display of public anger and revenge. They put forward a second set of charges, among them the evident fact that Suffolk had protected William Tailboys from arrest and imprisonment. The king now called the lords to his inner chamber in the palace at Westminster, where he repudiated the jurisdiction of parliament by placing Suffolk under his own ‘rule and governance’. It was a peculiarly maladroit manner of proceeding, but there seemed at the time to be no alternative. A few weeks later Henry announced that Suffolk would be banished from the realm for a period of five years. Suffolk set sail from Ipswich at the end of April, bound for the Low Countries; but he did not reach his destination. The ship in which he sailed was detained, and he was taken on board another vessel where he was quickly tried by the sailors. He was decapitated with a rusty sword, and his body dumped on a beach near Dover.

The French king’s recapture of Normandy took only a year and six days. By the summer of 1450 the English forces had been expelled from most of the towns and cities of France; only Calais and parts of Gascony remained. In a portrait of the time Charles VII was described as Le Très victorieux Roi de France. A French chronicler remarked that ‘never had so great a country been conquered in so short a space of time, with such small loss to the populace and to the soldiery’. Henry’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou had done less than nothing to consolidate English rule in France, and indeed Margaret was blamed by many for having engineered or expedited the final disaster. A rhyme went around at the time, ‘The king’s son lost all his father won’. The war of a hundred years was almost over.

It is hard to exaggerate the damage to the king. Not only had he failed in his bid for military conquest, he had actually been forced to surrender territories which the English monarchy had previously held by right. From this time forward Henry effectively lost control of his realm, and in the absence of leadership the confusion turned into chaos. It was also reported, in the parliament of 1450, that the king’s debts had more than doubled in sixteen years; at this point the merchants of London, individuals and corporations, withdrew their financial support. That is another reason for the dynastic struggle of the Wars of the Roses; the king did not have the money to administer the country. There were fears that this was becoming what was known as a ‘wild world’. A man who called himself ‘Queen of the Faery’ preached in the towns and villages of Kent. In Canterbury a fuller by the name of ‘Blue Beard’ tried to muster a force or fellowship of men about him. Kent here is the key.

The fact that the head of Suffolk had been found near Dover, and that the shipmen involved in the execution were men of Kent, inevitably placed that independent and sometimes recalcitrant shire under suspicion. The king’s representative there threatened that the whole county would be laid to waste and turned into a deer park; but the men of Kent already had cause for complaint. The unsuccessful war against France had severely affected the maritime trade on which their prosperity relied. The coast was attacked with impunity by corsairs from France and Brittany. Agnes Paston wrote that a friend of the family ‘had been taken with enemies, walking by the sea side’. She went on to pray that ‘God give grace that the sea be better kept than it is now, or else it shall be perilous dwelling by the sea-coast’.

The beleaguered men of Kent rallied at Calehill Heath in the neighbourhood of Ashford at the end of May 1450; they gathered at a meeting place that had been employed for many hundreds of years. The old spirit of place asserted itself in times of uncertainty and danger. On this heath they elected as their leader and representative Jack Cade, and under his guidance they marched towards London; by 11 June they were encamped on Blackheath within sight of the capital. In their declaration they averred that ‘they call us risers and traitors and the king’s enemies, but we shall be found to be his true liege men’. Instead they attacked his advisers or, as they were commonly known, the ‘evil counsellors’; as a result of their machinations, ‘his lordship is lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost, himself so poor that he cannot afford his meat or drink’. They knew, by whispers or by rumours, the parlous state of his finances. The rebels also denounced the manifest perversions of local justice and the oppressions of local magnates, exposing indirectly the confused state of the entire realm.

Some among them, however, directed more personal criticism at Henry. William Merfield declared, at the market in the ancient hamlet of Brightling in East Sussex, that the king was ‘a natural fool and would often hold a staff in his hands with a bird on the end, playing therewith as a fool’. This must refer to some children’s toy; how Merfield came to know the fact is unclear. Harry Mase, a weaver from Ely, said that the king ‘looked more like a child than a man’ and that within a short time the ship imprinted on the coinage would be replaced by a sheep.

One of the words on the lips of Cade’s men was ‘common weal’ or ‘commonwealth’, being the grand polity of king and kingdom, lords and commons; the subject owes obedience to the king, but the king must also strive for the welfare of the subject. All the estates of the realm were, or should be, united in an association of duty and responsibility. It was this association, by implication, that was being undermined by Henry and his advisers.

The forces of the king reacted quickly enough to the threat; while Cade’s followers were encamped on Blackheath, emissaries from the king arrived on 13 June and ordered them to disperse. They also carried pardons with them. The king had wanted to go to them in person, emulating the bravery of the young Richard II seventy years before, but his advisers at first demurred. Several thousand men were gathered; 3,000 pardons, at least, were eventually issued. On the morning of 18 June Henry did advance upon Blackheath, with a large contingent of soldiers and guns, but the rebels had already dispersed under cover of the darkness of the previous night; they had been warned about the arrival of the royal army. It was a precautionary measure in another sense; to have fought against the king’s banner was manifest treason. Some of the king’s men, under the command of Sir Humphrey and Sir William Stafford, then pursued them; the rebels trapped them with an ambush, in which the Staffords were killed. The first blood had gone to the men of Kent.

The blood was soon avenged. Several lords rode into Kent where they exacted retribution, a measure of force that only provoked the rebels still further. A period of confusion followed in which the lords, faced with mounting reaction, quarrelled with one another and in which some soldiers deserted to the rebel cause. The king and his companions, together with the justices of the realm, then fled London and retreated as fast as they could to the safety of the midlands; the mayor of London had begged the king to remain in the capital, but he refused. It was another example of the king’s lack of valour.

When they heard reports of the king’s retreat, Cade and his followers reassembled on Blackheath at the end of June; on the following day they entered Southwark, and commandeered the inns and hostelries of that district. Cade himself – who had become known as ‘the Captain’ and as ‘John Amend-All’ – stayed at the White Hart Inn, along the high street, that became the headquarters for the rebellion. The white hart had of course been the emblem of Richard II.

On 3 July Cade and his men crossed London Bridge, cutting the ropes of the drawbridge so that it could not be later raised against them, and proceeded to occupy the guildhall. In that place of justice several royal servants were convicted of high crimes against the country, and summarily executed at the fountain opposite Honey Lane known as the Cheapside Standard. The sheriff of Kent, one of the most hated, was dragged to Mile End where he was beheaded. Cade retired to the White Hart, in order to formulate his plans.

The Londoners, alarmed at the scale of the riot and damage along the streets of their city, now determined to prevent Cade from entering London once more across the bridge. A force of citizens confronted the rebels and a pitched battle, or series of battles, ensued. Cade, thwarted, determined to burn down the drawbridge; the Londoners, joined also by the remainder of the king’s servants who had escaped immediate justice, managed to close the entry-gate. Many perished in the flames of Cade’s fire.

A truce among the parties, now on opposite sides of the Thames, was mediated by a group of churchmen led by the archbishops of York and Canterbury; they had remained in the Tower during the riots. It was also concluded that the rebels, having submitted their demands, would receive a royal pardon under the great seal on condition that they dispersed to their homes. The majority of them did so, gratefully enough, but Cade refused or repented his previous submission. He raised the standard of revolt once more, but he commanded too few followers to be a serious threat. He fled south, where he was pursued and cornered; he was arrested in a garden at Heathfield in Sussex and died of his wounds soon afterwards. The revolt had been put down, but not as a result of any of the king’s actions.

At this juncture the duke of York returned from his unwelcome post in Ireland. It is of some interest that Jack Cade had called himself John Mortimer, thus aligning himself with the York family name; York had inherited the Mortimer lands and title twentyfive years before, when his mother, Anne Mortimer, had died while giving birth to him. Some of Cade’s followers spread the report that he was the duke’s cousin. This relationship is most unlikely, but it was suspected at the time that York had in some indirect way helped to foment the rebellion against the king’s authority. He returned to England without the king’s permission and was immediately seen as a potential threat to Henry’s rule; it was at this time that the king appointed York’s enemy, Somerset, as the Constable of England. In a series of formal public declarations, passing between the king and York, the duke averred that he had returned in order to clear his name of any unwarranted suspicions concerning the late rebellion; he announced that he had come in order to help to reform the king’s household. Henry duly invited him to join a ‘sad [wise or serious] and substantial council’.

This did not address the real problem concerning the enmity between York and Somerset after the debacle in Normandy. They blamed each other for the misconduct of the war, when in fact it was the king himself who should have incurred much of the responsibility for its failure. While Henry VI was still childless, York was the heir presumptive; but Somerset’s supremacy in the council of the king provoked York into the fear that he was about to be disinherited.

In September 1450, York came to Westminster with 5,000 men; he called for the dismissal of Somerset as well as others whom he believed to threaten him. But he moved a step too close to anarchy and civil war; his supporters led a noisy demonstration in Westminster Hall, and an attempt was made to assassinate Somerset. The Lords and Commons then intervened by promulgating a programme of reform in the king’s household; a bill to recognize York as the heir apparent was defeated. York retired to his ancestral estates, discomfited, and Somerset was still pre-eminent.

There followed a sequence of skirmishes and confrontations in which neither side could claim victory for its cause; York exercised his power against other magnates without consulting the king, and at the beginning of 1452 denounced Somerset for the fall of Normandy and declared that his rival was about to surrender Calais to the French. York marched south with his supporters, but was forced to withdraw his challenge in the face of overwhelming numbers raised by the rest of the nobility. No large Yorkist ‘party’ was ready to fight for his cause, and the majority of the other magnates disapproved of what looked very much like armed rebellion. He was forced to submit and sue for pardon, protesting all the while that he had acted ‘for the good of England’.

It seemed that Henry VI had prevailed but then, as has always happened in the history of England, an arbitrary and unforeseen circumstance turned the course of events. In the summer of 1453 the king fell into a stupor or, in the phrase of the period, his wit and reason were withdrawn. The origin of this malady is uncertain, and may lie in the series of humiliations and misfortunes that had beset the king since the beginning of his reign. But there was one precipitate and immediate cause. The last battle of the Hundred Years War had just been lost by the English. The citizens of Bordeaux had asked to be returned to English sovereignty, and an army was duly sent to assist them under the command of the earl of Shrewsbury; in the subsequent battle the English were routed and Shrewsbury, trapped beneath his fallen horse which had been killed by a cannon ball, was despatched with a hand-axe. This was also the battle in which the region of Gascony was finally surrendered to the French.

So Henry declined into a state of catatonic silence and despondency that was to endure for the next eighteen months. He could not walk or even rise from a chair without help; he had no awareness of time, and lost the power of speech. A child was born to him and Margaret of Anjou, in the autumn of this year, but even the arrival of a son and heir did not enliven him. The duke of Buckingham brought the infant to the king at Windsor Palace and, according to a contemporary,

presented him to the king in goodly wise, beseeching the king to bless him; and the king gave no manner answer. Nevertheless the duke abode still with the prince by the king, and when he could no manner answer have, the queen came in and took the prince in her arms and presented him in like form as the duke had done, desiring that he should bless it; but all their labour was in vain, for they departed thence without any answer or countenance, saving only that once he looked on the prince and cast down his eyes again, without any more.

If he could have known or guessed the fate of the young prince of Wales, he would have had reason for his sorrow. Two months later the senior members of the council came to him, but ‘they could get no answer nor sign’.

In the absence of effective leadership the king’s council were obliged to turn to York; he was no longer heir apparent, according to the parliament house, but he was the senior nobleman in the kingdom. York had forgotten and forgiven nothing; he returned to London in the full heat of his anger. His great enemy, Somerset, was consigned to the Tower on the charge of betraying English possessions in France. York also declared that Somerset as well as the king and queen had effectively tried to isolate and to silence him. Margaret of Anjou had always opposed York, but her antipathy became all the more marked when it seemed possible that York might try to supplant her young son. Here were the seeds of the subsequent bloodshed. She turned York into an enemy by regarding him as one. She presented a Bill in which she was to be granted the power to govern the country and appoint the great officers of state but, in March 1454, York was declared to be Protector of the kingdom.

Five doctors had been appointed to watch over the ailing king. It was believed that the dung of doves, applied to the soles of the feet, induced healing sleep. Milk was very good for melancholy. But the eating of hazelnuts discomforted the brain. Green ginger, on the other hand, quickened the memory. Awareness returned to Henry slowly and by degrees. It was reported that ‘the king is well amended, and has been so since Christmas day … On Monday afternoon the queen came to him and brought the lord prince with her; then he asked what the prince’s name was, and the queen told him Edward; then he held up his hands and thanked God thereof. And he said he never knew him till that time, nor knew what was being said to him, nor knew where he had been whilst he was sick … He said that he was now in charity with all the world …’

It is not clear that he ever fully recovered from his affliction; the reports of his behaviour in succeeding years suggest that to some extent he had become feeble-minded. Yet the protectorate of York had now come to an end. He gave his resignation to the king at the palace in Greenwich; Somerset was duly released from the Tower and returned to the side of the monarch. Henry now also welcomed back to his councils the perceived enemies of York; he was behaving like the leader of a faction rather than as the ruler of the country. Naturally enough York deemed himself to be under threat. He felt obliged to make a preliminary strike but, in the process, he began the conflict that came to be known as the Wars of the Roses.

32

Meet the family

In the absence of her husband Margaret Paston decided to attack those who had turned her out of the manor house at Gresham; the violent affair was mentioned in the previous chapter. She called on her husband to send handguns, crossbows, longbows and poll-axes; her servants wore body armour. In the same letter she asked for a pound (450 grammes) of almonds, a pound of sugar and some cloth to make gowns for the children. The ordinary life of the world continued even in the face of extreme violence. Or it could be claimed that violence was as ordinary, and as unremarkable, as almonds and sugar.

It is sometimes surmised that in the fifteenth century the expression of emotion is different from that of our own time. But where, if anywhere, does that difference lie? A delicacy of emphasis, not generally found in the register of contemporary speech, can perhaps be found in the Paston letters. Of the Paston servants we learn that ‘they are sad [serious] and well advised men, saving one of them who is bald, called William Penny, who is as good a man as goes upon the earth, saving he will be a little, as I understand, a little cupshotten [drunk]; but he is no brawler, but full of courtesy …’ Immense shrewdness is also evident. ‘John Osborne flattered me,’ John Paston wrote, ‘because he would have borrowed money from me. In retailing of wood there it will be hard to trust him. He is needy.’ Again, in another letter, we learn that one man ‘had but few words but I felt by him he was right evil disposed to the parson and you; but covered language he had’.

In many respects it was a hard world, filled with threat. ‘I pray you beware how you walk if he be there, for he is full cursed-hearted and lumish.’ The meaning of ‘lumish’ is uncertain; it is a word that has gone forever. One husband believed that his wife’s child was not his. ‘I heard say that he said, if she comes in his presence to make her excuse, that he should cut off her nose to make her be known what she is, and if her child comes in his presence he said he would kill it.’ That may of course have been an idle threat. A tendency to extravagance is found in the period. Of the earl of Arran, John Paston writes that ‘he is the most courteous, gentlest, wisest, kindest, most companionable, freest, largest and most bounteous knight’.

Humour and irony are also to be found. When one son of Paston contracted a cold in damp Norwich he wrote that ‘I was never so well armed for the war as I have now armed myself for the cold.’ Resignation was a familiar theme. ‘If it thus continue I am not all undone, nor none of us; and if otherwise then & …’ Which is as much to say – well if we are undone, then so be it. There were striking phrases such as ‘I know you have a great heart’ and, sarcastically, ‘this is a marvellous disposed country’. ‘And so I am with the jailor, with a shackle on my heel.’ ‘This is a right queasy world.’ Of an indiscreet man it was said that ‘he is not secure in the bite’. Flattering an enemy was sometimes necessary because ‘a man must some time set a candle before the Devil’. ‘Towards me’ is written as ‘to me-wards’.

The syntax is often complicated with ‘wherefore’ and ‘insomuch’ and ‘therein’; the sentences are often long and convoluted, but throughout there is an energy or earnestness of expression that drives the narrative forward. The intricate constructions, replete with double negatives at every turn, suggest a world of great formality; but one animated by the sheer struggle for survival. That is what lends the correspondence its pace and urgency.

The status of the Paston family itself indicates social movement and change. Clement Paston was married to a bondwoman (albeit she became, by a medieval paradox, heiress to her brother who was an attorney) and owned only a small farm in Norfolk; by dint of saving and borrowing he managed to send his son, William, to Eton College. In turn William Paston became a lawyer and was eventually appointed to be Justice of the Common Pleas; although his mother had been technically a villein he married into a gentry family. The next generation of the Paston family were themselves members of the gentry, and the male Pastons became knights of the shire. Within three generations the family had been transformed. This was a characteristic feature of English society.

Details in the Paston correspondence, assembled together, open up the world. ‘I pray you that Pitt may truss up in a chest which I left in your chamber at London my tawny gown furred with black and the doublet of purple satin and the doublet of black satin, and my writing box of cypress, and my book of the meeting of the Duke and the Emperor …’

You can also hear the people speak. ‘Forsooth when I came into the chamber there the first word I heard was this that you said to my Master, John Paston, “Who that ever says so, I say he lies falsely in his head.” ’

‘Ya. You should have told what moved me to say so to him.’

‘I could not tell that which I had not heard.’

‘You should have examined the matter.’

‘Sir it did not belong to me to examine the matter, since I knew full well that I should not be a judge of the matter for it belongs only to a judge to study illam Sacre Scripture clausam where Holy Job says “Causam quam nesciebam diligentissime investigabam”.’ So men were inclined, and able, to break into Latin when addressing one another.

Latin was also used for the ruder moments. Of two men in close alliance it was written that singuli caccant uno ano or ‘they shit out of the same arse’. There is much talk of ‘worship’, meaning personal honour, and ‘disworship’. Those in authority suggest that they will ‘prove a good lord’ or otherwise to their supplicants. It was a world of gossip, with many ‘flyting words’ passing around London. It was also a world of plots and machinations, of convenient alliances and accidental events, of endless litigation and pleas for patronage.

Domestic aspects of the Paston correspondence suggest that the nature of human life is not greatly changed. Margaret Paston wrote to her husband while pregnant that ‘I pray that you will send me dates and cinnamon as hastily as you may … From your groaning wife.’ In a previous letter she wrote, ‘I pray you be not strange [slow] of writing letters to me between this time and when you come home; if I could, I would have one from you every day.’ ‘Forgive me,’ one man writes, ‘I write to make you laugh.’

Letters often begin with ‘I greet you well’. They generally end with a religious salutation, ‘the Blessed Trinity have you in his holy governance’ or ‘may God keep you and deliver you’.

One of the pleasures of the Paston correspondence, however, lies in the extent to which the life of the day is revealed. The actions of recorded history may be stirring or dispiriting, according to taste, but the busy concourse of human existence can be heard beneath the events recorded by the annalists and the chroniclers. The real life and spirit of the time are held in the innumerable remarks and encounters among the people going about their business in market and in town, in hamlet and in field. Those who pursue the process of living are those who create the history and traditions of the country in a million unacknowledged ways; they form the language of expression, and they preserve the stability of the land.

So in a period of war and domestic turmoil the general economy of the country was growing at a rapid pace. The diminution of population at the time of the Black Death in 1348 meant that there was more land, and more work, for fewer people; this in itself was the context for the relatively new experience of prosperity. It was a commonplace of observation that the English agricultural worker was better fed and housed than the French peasant. A Venetian diplomat remarked in 1497 that England was an underpopulated country but that ‘the riches of England are greater than those of any other country in Europe, as I have been told by the oldest and most experienced merchants, and also as I myself can vouch from what I have seen. This is owing in the first place to the great fertility of the soil which is such that, with the exception of wine, they import nothing from abroad for their subsistence … everyone who makes a tour in this island will soon become aware of this great wealth.’

The parish churches of the period are one of the most visible signs of affluence still to be observed in the English landscape, parish rivalling parish with the extent of its patronage; the screen-work and roof carvings are of the finest quality. It was the great age of the church tower, from Fulham in London to Mawgan-in-Pyder at St Mawgan in Cornwall. The majority of the stone bridges of the country were improved in the fifteenth century; London Bridge itself was rebuilt and widened. In the first half of that century a vogue for building libraries in the cathedrals, and in the colleges of the two universities, can be identified; fine examples can be found at Merton College and at New College in Oxford as well as in the cathedrals of York, Lincoln, Wells, Canterbury and All Saints, Bristol. The divinity school at Oxford began to rise in 1424 and was roofed in 1466.

Schools, almshouses and hospitals were constructed throughout the realm. It was the age of the large and unfortified country residences, where increasingly brick rather than stone was considered the suitable medium. The wall around the town of Hull, constructed in the second half of the fourteenth century, was the first public edifice built entirely of brick. The public institutions of town and city were improved or built anew; between 1411 and 1440, for example, the present Guildhall of London was erected. The Guildhall at York was built in the 1450s. We have already mentioned Henry’s meticulous concern for the building of Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge; the foundation stone of the extraordinary King’s College Chapel was laid by the king in the summer of 1446. Architecture was in the fullest possible sense the expression of the country, as it clothed itself in vestments of stone. It acts as a balance to the historical accounts which almost of necessity chronicle the violence and insecurity of the age. Most of what is now regarded as ‘medieval’ dates from the fifteenth century, and we can say with confidence that it remains physically close to us. The churches and libraries, the guildhalls and bridges, are still in use.

Periods of great economic activity succeeded periods of slump, so that the familiar cycle of overconfidence and anxiety was always in motion; yet what we now call the gross domestic product of the country materially increased. When a ship coming from Dieppe landed at Winchelsea harbour in 1490, it contained satin and pipes of wine, razors and damask, needles and mantles of leopards’ skins, five gross of playing cards and eight gross of plaques stamped with the image of the Lamb of God. A trade in monkeys from Venice, described as ‘apes and japes and marmosets tailed’, flourished. An inventory of the household goods of Sir John Fastolf reveals that he purchased cloth from Zeeland (now part of the Netherlands), silver cups from Paris, coats of mail from Milan, treacle pots from Genoa, cloth from Arras and girdles from Germany. An old rhyme tells the story:

Hops and turkies, carps and beer,

Came into England all in a year.

In fact by the end of the fifteenth century, beer itself was coming out of England. It had once been imported from Prussia, but English merchants were soon carrying beer from London to Flanders.

Economic activity quickened in a variety of different spheres. A small native industry of glass-painting emerged, and carpet manufactories were established at Romsey in Hampshire. Great merchants now rivalled their competitors in Genoa or in Venice. William Cannynges of Bristol possessed, in 1461, ten ships and employed 800 sailors as well as 100 craftsmen. The ships of the merchants were in fact employed as a volunteer force working with the royal navy to patrol the seas and to defend the shores. The cities and towns that engaged in maritime trade, such as Bristol and Southampton, naturally flourished. John Cabot sailed out of Bristol for the New World in 1497, looking for new markets and new trade. The mercantile interest was successful in another sense; the more affluent merchants of the towns were now attending the parliament house, and pressing their demands for the exclusive management of what was not necessarily fair trade.

Iron from the Weald in Kent and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire was much in demand; other wooded areas, where timber was available to create the charcoal for smelting the ore, were fully exploited. In the Forest of Dean alone there were seventy-two forges. All Saints Church in the village of Newland, on the western edge of the forest, has a brass engraving of a miner. His leather breeches are tied below his knee, and he sports a wooden mine-hod over his shoulder in which to carry the iron ore; he holds a mattock or small pickaxe in his right hand, and between his teeth he carries a candle-holder or ‘Nellie’. He would, of course, work and dress as a small farmer when he was not mining. The silver mines of Cornwall and Devon, Dorset and Somerset, were expanded. It was said at the time that ‘the kingdom is of greater value under the land than it is above’. Productivity increased in the shipyards, the gunsmitheries and the bell foundries.

The reign of wool reached new heights during the rule of Henry VI and of his successor. The annual export of raw wool had declined a little from its peak in the fourteenth century but this was offset by a proportionate increase in the export of woollen cloth. Together they accounted for approximately 80 per cent of the country’s exports. English cloths were taken to the shores of the Black Sea, and were traded at the fair of Novgorod as well as the Rialto in Venice; they went to Denmark and to Prussia. The merchant adventurers, in control of the cloth trade, were exporting approximately 60,000 rolls of cloth each year by the end of the century.

It was a business that engaged a significant part of the nation; the wool was given to village women to comb and to spin before being sent to the weaver; to this day, an unmarried woman is known as a spinster. Once the wool had been woven into cloth it was given to the fuller for dyeing and then passed on to the shearman for finishing. The dominance of wool is the reason why the Lord Chancellor of England, until 2005, always sat upon a woolsack in the House of Lords. The towns that were involved in the cloth trade – notably Colchester – became larger and stronger. The fulling mills of the West Riding and the west of England turned ever faster. Broadcloth came from the Cotswolds and the Stroud Valley. As York and Coventry decayed, so villages like Lavenham in Suffolk with its famous ‘wool church’ thrived.

Wool raw and finished was indeed the motor of the fifteenthcentury English economy, and as a result more and more land was preserved for the breeding of sheep. This in turn led to the enclosing of land for that purpose. Villages were moved or even destroyed to make way for the sheep-runs; the cultivation of grain gave way to rearing. The shepherds lived in wheeled huts that followed the flocks. In the late fifteenth century one Warwickshire antiquary, John Rous, complained in his Historia Regum Angliae of ‘the modern destruction of villages which brings dearth to the commonwealth. The root of this evil is greed … As Christ wept over Jerusalem so do we weep over the destruction of our own times.’ In his own county there are more than a hundred deserted villages, the vast majority of them cleared in the fifteenth century. The rights of freeholders and copyholders were in principle protected, but those who had dwelled on the land by custom could be evicted with impunity. Much of the population moved a few miles, perhaps, and continued working the land. A few were not so fortunate. That rootless phenomenon known then as ‘the sturdy beggar’ is first mentioned in the 1470s.

All things move in restless combination. There is a law of contrast at work in human history, whereby one development provokes a counter-development. Many people suffered from the pace of economic change, but others benefited from it. The successful small farmer was now paying rent for his land as a tenant, rather than performing labour duties; the small freeholder, known as the yeoman, is also more in evidence. The class of villein or serf gave way to the labourer working for a wage. The feudal economy had to a large extent been succeeded by a money economy.

Yet the prosperity of England was by no means evenly shared, and it is important to bear in mind the unimaginable extremes of poverty beside the perceived affluence of certain county towns and regions. The fact that the contrasts of life were more violent, and the insecurity of existence more palpable, rendered the people more passionate and more excitable. Theirs was a life more intense, more sensitive, more arduous and more irritable than our own.

33

The divided realm

Signs and portents of civil unrest, according to the native chroniclers, darkened the air of the mid-fifteenth century. A rain of blood fell in different regions, and the holy waters of healing wells overflowed. A huge cock was observed in the waters off Weymouth, ‘coming out of the sea, having a great crest upon his head and a great red beard and legs half a yard [45 centimetres] long’. Many people heard a strange voice rising in the air, between Leicester and Banbury, calling out ‘Bows! Bows!’ A woman in the county of Huntingdon ‘felt the embryo in her womb weeping as it were, and uttering a kind of sobbing noise’ as if it dreaded being born into a time of calamity.

The houses of York and Lancaster were in fact two sides of the same ruling family. The house of Lancaster was descended from the fourth son of Edward III, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; the house of York was descended from the fifth son of the same king, Edmund, duke of York, whose youngest son had married the great-granddaughter of the third son. They are sometimes described as the third and fourth sons respectively, but this omits one male child who lived for six months. Their closeness, however, bred only enmity and ferocity. Blue blood was often bad blood. It was like a fight breaking out among a small assembly; slowly it spreads, bringing in more and more people. But there is still a vast crowd standing outside the arena of combat, watching silently and incuriously or going about their familiar business.

York and his followers retired to their estates after the recovery of the king from mental incapacity and the return of Somerset to power, but in the spring of 1455 they were summoned to attend a great council at Leicester. York feared that this would be the occasion for his arrest or arraignment, and so he forestalled events by gathering his supporters and marching down towards London. He was joined by the representatives of one of the great families of northern England; York’s brother-in-law was Richard Neville, the earl of Salisbury, and the earl’s son was another Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick. Their inveterate enemies in the north, the family of the Percys, had taken the side of Somerset. So local enmities exacerbated the general conflict. Salisbury and Warwick, who came to be known as ‘Warwick the kingmaker’, proclaimed that they had taken up arms to remove ‘our enemies of approved experience, such as abide and keep themselves under the wing of your Majesty Royal’.

They had at all costs to maintain the fiction that they were not marching against the king but against the king’s councillors; otherwise they would have incurred the charge of high treason. Nevertheless York’s army now faced the king’s army in open battle at St Albans. There had been some attempt at preliminary negotiations, but York feared that Henry was wholly in Somerset’s control and was therefore not to be trusted. So his forces entered the town at ten o’clock in the morning on 22 May 1455, and began a series of rapid raids in its main street and public spaces. They were looking for their enemies. Somerset and Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, had been marked for slaughter. They were tracked down and killed on the spot in a notable if not unique act of savagery. The king himself was wounded in the neck, as he sat beneath his banner in the market square, but he was not seriously injured. Sixty men were killed in the fighting, which lasted for only a couple of hours.

Once their victory was assured, York and the Nevilles submitted to the king. It was reported that they ‘besought him of his Highness to take them as his true liegemen, saying that they never intended to hurt his person’. Henry then ‘took them to grace, and so desired them to cease their people, and that there should no more harm be done’. York then escorted the king back to London, if escort is the appropriate word for an armed entourage, and four days later presented Henry with his crown in St Paul’s Cathedral. It might legitimately have been asked who was in charge. A friend wrote to John Paston, on that day, ‘as for what rule we shall have, yet I know never’. The king’s forces had been defied, and the king himself wounded; the order of the world had been turned upside down, and the governance of the realm placed in utmost peril. Yet who could have known or guessed that the combat of St Albans was the prelude to an internecine war that would continue for thirty years, provoke seven or eight major battles on English soil, and lead to the killing of some eighty nobles of royal blood? It has all the ingredients of a revenge tragedy. ‘By God’s blood,’ one Lancastrian noble screamed at the son of York on a later battlefield, ‘your father killed mine, and so will I do to you and to all your kin!’ We might be back in the days of the Anglo-Saxons, as if the years between had been a dream.

Within a short time after the battle the king had fallen prey to some malady, the nature of which remains unknown. It is easy to conjecture that he had relapsed into the same state of confusion as before, perhaps traumatized by his defeat, but he does not seem to have withdrawn completely from the world. He even managed to open the parliament in the summer of 1455. After a delay of some months York resumed the protectorate but the king, or his wife working in his name, let it be known to his councillors that he wished to be kept informed ‘in all matters as touching his honour, worship and safety’. The royal family were now more wary and defensive; they feared that York aspired to being king in all but name.